Fennel and Apple Soup
This morning I decided to make fennel and apple soup - no particular reason. It looked straightforward. From the ingredients listed - spring onions, garlic, fennel, celery, a cooking apple and vegetable stock - all I needed was fennel and the apple. Off went the spouse to the shopping centre. After a while came the text: "No fennel." The spouse is very pleased with the new green grocer up at the shopping centre. He finds him very obliging and chatty. The green grocer had no fennel, having thrown the previous day's supply away. The spouse would have taken even that, saying it was "only for soup." Only for soup? Harrumph! Anyway, the green grocer explained that fennel doesn't keep well. According to Celia Brooks Brown's introduction to the recipe, fennel will store better in the fridge if you remove the feather fronds. (I hadn't heard of Celia before but she has her own website.)
I went down to the local green grocer's place and "Young Stephen" had a supply of fennel in his fridge. When I arrived home I got stuck straight in, washing, peeling and chopping. It didn't take long to cook.
I predicted that the younger offspring wouldn't like it, but he didn't dislike it. The spouse warned him against being critical. I intervened, saying that when he (the youngr offspring) said that last week's soup tasted "like nothing", it was probably because I had said to the spouse something like without the chicken, the chickpea soup would have been nothing." I suggested to the younger offspring that he might like to use words like "bland" or "insipid" when criticising food that he found didn't taste of much. The spouse retorted that I would still have been offended, to which I replied, "Yes, but I would have been impressed by his vocabulary."
The verdict on the soup: the three adult members of the household liked it very much. It can be served cold too - I'm not sure I'd like that.
Bee Brief
- I didn't come across bees in my reading during the week, apart from an e-mail from MH, who is just back from France and still buzzing about a bee she named Berthe. Welcome home, MH!
- Someone at Irish Seed Savers rang me during the week and asked if I'd prefer to go to a session on bees this Sunday (tomorrow). The woman running the session had said that there is more happening with the bees tomorrow than there will be during the Getting the bees ready for winter course (see blog of 8th August). I declined to swap dates, as I have other arrangements in place. I hope that workshop goes ahead - I'm looking forward to wearing a bee suit.The tension of it al!
- Bee box project: project status - static. I will have to try and pin the older offspring down to a date. Or a particular week.
- This is a rather tenuous link: I met a friend whom I haven't seen for a while and she gave me a late birthday present, a pendant by Alan Ardiff. This prompted me to look at his website and - lo and behold - there is a pendant entitled Honey and depicting a bee. The matching earrings have little honeycombs in them!
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