Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Broad bean and mint soup Today's soup making process was not an unqualified success but I learned from it.  I chose to make broad bean and mint soup and yesterday the spouse duly tracked down and bought the broad bean pods as instructed.  I got out two pints of home made chicken stock to defrost, noting that the supplies were running low. This morning the spouse brought the younger offspring out for a walk in Dun Laoghaire and I got up after Sunday Miscellany to start on the soup preparations. My mistake was to interpret the the instructions to mean that I was to use the pods, not the beans themselves. The recipe (one of Sophie Grigson's) says: "...Skin each bean by slitting the tough outer skin with a fingernail or a small sharp knife ..." For some reason I pictured runner beans and the way you have to remove the "thread" from them. So, having blanched the pods, I pushed out the beans, discarded them and prepared the pods for cooking. I then ...

Soupe de Poissons This morning I opened The Soup Book and decided to make soupe de poissons by Marie-Pierre Moine. It contains onions, leeks, mixed fish and seafood, dried fennel stalk, tomatoes, garlic (lots of it), flat-leaf parsley, bay leaves, dried orange peel, tomato puree and saffron.  The suggested accompaniment is croutes rubbed with garlic and spread with rouille (a spicy garlic sauce) or topped with Gruyere cheese.  Getting the ingredients together required some effort. I cheated by using frozen prawns from the freezer, fresh fennel, fresh orange peel and curly-leaf parsley (from the garden - the slugs haven't eaten it all!).  The spouse had told me about a new fish shop on Upper Rathmines Rd and I was intending to go there on my way home from town this afternoon, but on my way into town I spotted a fish shop near Portobello Bridge. There and then, while sitting near - but not in - my favourite seats on the bus I resolved to call in on the way home.  S...

Celery and Celeriac Soup Yesterday (Saturday 13th March) was the day for making soup. I've realised, by the way, that as I tend to prepare this blog over several days, I need to put in dates for the various activities or events I report on. During the week I spotted celeriac in the local green grocer's. As I've never cooked celeriac before I thought it might be a good choice for this weekend's soup. On arriving home I got out The Soup Book and checked the possibilities: Camembert and celeriac, celeriac and hazelnut, the intriguingly titled "soup of the first and last", and celery and celeriac. So, being one for a little alliteration, I chose the last. The ingredients include the eponymous vegetables, potato, and vegetable or chicken stock. The suggested accompaniment is walnut bread. Apparently, celeriac ( Apium graveolens rapaceum ) is also known as 'celery root,' 'turnip-rooted celery' or 'knob celery' (see Wikipedia). An article en...

Funny Honey Just a very quick post today. We're back from Austria. In a supermarket we saw jars of pink and green honey! We didn't go close enough to find out what was in them. Also in Austria I tried out different soups - Erbsensuppe mit Wurstl (lentil soup with sausage), tomato, potato, broccoli, etc. All tasty, but definitely not home made! Colony - Update MH tells me that Colony (www.colonymovie.com; see my blog of 25th January) may have won an award recently. I haven't been able to confirm as yet but here are a couple of links to articles about the documentary and colony collapse disorder - Suite 101 Film Ireland

This weekend's soup is watercress (one of two recipes in The Soup Book ). It contains: onions, watercress (stalks cooked with the onions; leaves added later), pears (cored, but no mention of peeling. I left them unpeeled. You have to take risks), vegetable stock (cheated and use cubes), and cream. I've have got as far as liquidising the soup ready for a dinner party. I'll add the cream when I re-heat it. Bothar - Bee My Honey Appeal, 2010 Bothar (www.bothar.ie) is an Irish charity that "enables families and communities worldwide to overcome hunger and poverty and to restore the environment in a sustainable way." One of its projects is the Bee My Honey appeal which takes place in the run-up to St Valentine's Day. Donations (Eu50, Eu90 or Eu125) go towards supporting families in Uganda, Tanzania and Cameroon to set up beehives. Project families learn how to keep bees and can make money from honey and wax; the environment benefits at the same time. Incidentall...