Lentil Soup Another lentil soup (see last month's blog about green lentil and lime soup) but this time it's red. Still in "What can I use up from my cupboard?" mode and entering a new and overlapping mode entitled "Yikes! How can I economise now my pay has been cut?", I came across one and a half packets of red lentils earlier in the week, thanks to the younger offspring's thorough tidying of the stores. I checked The Soup Book and came across the recipe containing red lentils, onions, celery, carrots, garlic and vegetable stock. At half past eight this morning I got up and started my preparations. The spouse had bought the required vegetable juice yesterday. The recipe options were tomato or vegetable juice and stirred by the autonomy of doing the weekly shopping unfettered by his helpmeet, he chose vegetable. What a man! The stock is vegetable and I'm using a commercial bouillon mix for the first time. Curry powder is called for but my partly Angl...
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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...