Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Pichelsteiner   Last Sunday I spent some time making a list of all the recipes in The Soup Book after someone asked me how many more recipes did I have to get through. I counted 199 soup recipes and ten bread recipes, and I have made thirty-seven soups, including the most recent. So I still have some way to go. At this rate, it could take me five years! So, Pichelsteiner. What is it? The Soup Book lists it as a German soup containing lamb, but suggests that it is "versatile enough to work with pork or beef instead of lamb." On looking it up on the internet (including German language descriptions), I discovered that Pichelsteiner (from Buechelstein, a mountain in Bavaria) is a mixed meat stew or Eintopf (one pot). Other recipes use a combination of beef, pork and veal, but not lamb; the common vegetables are onions and cabbage. The Soup Book's ingredients include lamb (shoulder or neck), onions, dried marjoram, dried lovage or thyme, vegetable stock, carrots, leek...

Vanishing of the Bees Vanishing of the Bees is a film made in 2007 about bees and colony collapse disorder. Here are a couple of links: www.vanishingbees.com and www.vanishingbees.co.uk. I've just added my first widget to my blog! It's from the UK website address above. Why Bees? My rather cursory interest in bees dates back to my primary school days. I must have been nine or ten years of age and was supposed to be working on a project of my choice. A deadline was looming and everyone else seemed to be working away on their projects. I couldn't think of anything and had been told off for my previous project work! Exasperated, my teacher told me to do my project on bees. I remember reading just the one book - and probably copying it. In spite of myself, I became interested in what I was reading. I must have run out of time because I remember getting to the section about bees' dances as a means of communication but not including the information in my project. One of the ...