Carrot Cream with Onion and Cumin

Carrot Cream with Onion and Cumin 

Last weekend I observed that I was progressing slowly through the summer vegetables section of  The Soup Book (only fifteen out of fifty-eight or twenty-five per cent) so this weekend I decided I'd better tackle the deficit. The recipe for carrot cream is by Marie-Pierre Moine, the author of four recipes I have already used. The ingredients include onions, cumin seeds, ground cumin, carrots, an orange, cream and parsley. In her introduction Moine says that making this soup is "fiddly" but "worth the effort". I didn't find it too fiddly. She was referring to liquidising and sieving the soup, but I have become accustomed to this level of effort after sixteen months of soup-making.
The spouse, the older offspring and I had the completed carrot cream for our lunch (the younger offspring was enjoying being off our leash). We all enjoyed it, the spouse citing the orange tanginess while the cream did it for me. It's not up there with bouillabaisse, but it is a soup worth making again.

P.S. The younger offspring arrived home about half an hour later and had the soup for his lunch. He was reasonably accurate at identifying the ingredients. His tastes are certainly developing and he's come a long way from surviving on ham sandwiches, pasta with tomato ketchup and pink yoghurts!

"First find your bees a settled sure abode"

The above line is fromVirgil's Georgic IV, written over 2,000 years ago! The spouse kindly found the link to the Internet Classics Archive where you can browse works of classical literature by fifty-nine authors. I had a quick search using the word "bee" and found this quote by Epictetus:

It is a shame that one who sweetens his drink with the gifts of the bee, should embitter God's gift Reason with vice.(Epictetus, The Golden Sayings)

Regular readers of my blog will know that I am keen reader of fiction and have been all my life. During the week I came across this apt quote:

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. (James  Lowell Russell)

Last year the spouse and I launched ourselves into Swedish crime novels. I am currently reading Henning Mankell's The Man from Beijing. So far I have come across the simile "like a fly to a honeypot" used twice: "Lots of people are drawn to the city like flies to a honeypot" (p95); and "Then I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation" (p196). Would I have noticed if I wasn't keeping a look out for references to bees and honey?