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 u...
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German Chicken Broth According to the introductory lines in The Soup Book , this recipe is "based on a Thuringian vegetable soup" and "requires a good-quality, well-flavoured chicken stock, so make your own for best results." The last batch of chicken stock made in this house had pork chop bones added to it, so that's the stock I've used. The other ingredients are green beans, carrots, kohlrabi and mangetout or sugar snap peas: the finished broth is garnished with cream and finely chopped chervil. Kohlrabi is also known as German turnip ( rassica oleracea L. Gongylodes group). Of course, when I'm not looking for them, I see them in the shops but on the day when I want to buy some, I can't find them. So I substituted ordinary (white) turnips. They might even be just what I wanted. I bought them at the green grocer's cum garden centre (tiny) cum bistro (more below). The broth is cooked. The recipe is ver...
This afternoon (Good Friday, 2nd April) the spouse and I strolled down the road to the next "village" to order canapes for our forthcoming party. We lingered at the book shop where we enjoyed a quiet pot of tea. I happened to notice on an adjacent bookshelf a copy of The Georgics I referred to in my blog of 16th January ( My Secret Life with Bees in Literature ). I glanced through it and saw the section in which Virgil writes about the care of bees. I hummed and hawed about whether or not to buy a copy, but didn't in the end. The birthday of someone I referred to in my blog of 6th February is coming up soon - that's why I went into the book shop: to buy a birthday card. Of course I picked out one with an illustration including a bee hive! The picture is a coloured pencil drawing of a garden by an artist called David Suff. On the card (published by Two Bad Mice - www.TwoBadMice.com) it's entitled "Beehive" , but on Suff's website it's "Seed...
My Secret Life with Bees in Literature The other night as I was going to bed I turned on the radio (RTE 1) and happened to hear the reading from The Book on One . It was an extract from Virgil's Georgics concerning bees. The Georgics is a poem completed c.29 BC, comprising four books that deal with crops, trees, livestock and bees. What I was listening to was a translation by Peter Fallon (www.peterfallon.com), founder of the Gallery Press. The reference to honey as manna caught my attention and I continued to listen to Virgil's ideas on providing an ideal environment for bees to thrive in. The translator was the reader. The spouse and I agreed he didn't read well. Nevertheless I soldiered on for the sake of my blog! Other bee-related books I have enjoyed in recent years are The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and The Beekeeper's Pupil by Sara George. As far as I can remember the former is about a community of women protecting each other and the latter a fictio...