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Carrot and Orange Soup

Carrot and Orange Soup

Yesterday I set out to buy ingredients for spicy spinach soup (from a Roopa Gulati recipe in The Soup Book) and when I got home I realised that I had already made it about a year ago. So I thought quickly. I knew I had a lot of carrots in the fridge, and on checking the summer vegetables section of The Soup Book, I came across the recipe for carrot and orange soup. The ingredients include leeks, which I had just bought, and orange juice, a carton of which we were slowly working our way through. I also needed ground coriander, cumin, stock, a potato and a bay leaf.

The sliced leek and carrots were the first ingredients into the pot, cooking gently until the leek softened. Next in were the potato, the ground spices, orange juice, stock and the bay leaf. About forty-five minutes later the soup was ready to be liquidised. There were just the two of us for lunch - the younger offspring and I. The boy tucked in and was particularly enthusiastic about the soup. Why am I always surprised by his enjoyment of food and why do I always comment on it? It must be something to do with his determination not to enjoy food and his self-imposed limited range of options when he was very small. Now I'm glad he's willing to try out the results of my experiments in soup making.

Bee News 

Here are some links to stories about bees in the news:

Pesticides linked to decline in bees (from The Irish Times, 30th March 2012).

Pesticides linked to honeybee decline (from The Guardian, 29th March 2012)

Toxic pollen and the mad bee disease disaster (by Alison Benjamin in The Guardian, 29th March 2012)

Apimondia 2013 will be held in the Ukraine!


Bee is for Bear

It was only a matter of time before I mentioned Winnie the Pooh. It was first published in 1926 and the first chapter of A A Milne's classic is entitled In which We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and some Bees, and the Stories begin.

[Winnie-the-Pooh] said to himself: "That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there's a buzzing-noise, somebody's making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you're a bee." 

That's it for today.

Minnie

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