Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Pear and Stilton Soup Pear and Stilton was the perfect soup to make on a busy day. It was quick to prepare and took only twenty minutes or so to cook.  The ingredients include onion, unsalted butter, pears, chicken stock, Stilton cheese, lemon juice and chopped chives. The younger offspring was elsewhere, so it was left to the spouse, the older offspring and me to taste and appraise.  I liked it and the testosterone-fuelled ones enjoyed it too. What more can I say? Bee Brief  Here are a couple of items I came across during the week. Smart bees are facing lethal threat (Irish Independent, 19th July 2010) I'm not quite sure what this Irish website is called but the people behind it seem to be involved in bee keeping and selling hives . Check out the blog. Agroscope - The Swiss Bee Research Centre.  From Bill Bryson's At Home - A Short History of Private Life : "[John Lubbock, a banker and keen entomologist who was known to Charles Darwin] had a particular i...

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 ...

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...