Onion and Garlic Soup

 Onion and Garlic Soup

 Regular readers will spot immediately that the spouse has done what he's good at and found the camera connector that I misplaced. Below is his photograph of yesterday's soup from the The Soup Book.  It was onion and garlic soup by Marie-Pierre Moine. The ingredients include a Spanish onion, a banana shallot, a small head of garlic, dry white wine, vegetable stock, milk, egg yolks, double cream and Dijon mustard.  Trying to avoid the onion fumes, I used a handheld blender to chop the onion and shallot together. These were then cooked until the water had evaporated.

Onion and garlic soup with croute

Meanwhile, I boiled the unpeeled garlic cloves until they were soft enough to squeeze the flesh from the skin. I added the wine, stock and milk to the onion mix before dealing with the garlic flesh. To this I added the egg yolks, mashed them together then spooned in the cream. This mixture was stirred into the onion mix, and finally in went the Dijon mustard.

Marie-Pierre suggests serving with croutes topped with grated Gruyere or Cheddar. I opted for olive bread croutes topped with Emmental. The spouse, younger offspring and I sat down to sup. I thought it was fine - not great, not bad. The spouse enjoyed it and would eat it again. As for the boy, ... I'm not sure.

P.S. If you're interested, I've uploaded the fish and fennel soup photos (see blog entry for 19th November 2011).

Bees and Books 

Last month when I was at the honey show, I picked up fliers for Apimondia (the international bee health symposium) and the Federation of Irish Beekeepers' Associations' annual beekeeping summer course. The theme of Apimondia in 2012 is "From Challenges to Solutions."

I have a couple of books on the go at present, one of which I have to finish by tomorrow night in time for my book group on Wednesday. The other is Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Here are the bee references:

Every noise in the classroom is amplified: Jason Rycroft's syncopated pencil-tattoo, Neville Nelligan's snuffling nose, the escalating bee-like hummmmmm arising from Martin Anderson, ...

'Pleasant enough day out there,' Slattery remarks, as he does every morning it's not actually raining fire, and makes a beeline for the kettle.

So time is moving on and it's time for me to move on to other things.