Aubergine and Red Pepper Soup Today was a double effort as this aubergine and red pepper soup comprises two separate soups. In her introduction to her own recipe in The Soup Book , Sophie Grigson sums it up as "a two-in-one" with the "mild and gentle aubergine cream yanked into high gear with a swirl of the sweeter, hotter red pepper." The aubergine soup ingredients are olive oil, onion, carrot, parsley, coriander seeds, aubergines (obviously), risotto or pudding rice, and chicken or vegetable stock. The first seven ingredients are sweated together before the stock and seasoning are added. Similarly, the first few ingredients for the pepper soup (olive oil, garlic, red chillies and red peppers) are sweated together before tomatoes, tomato puree, sugar, seasoning and stock are added. The two soups are whizzed in a blender and reheated separately, of course. The aubergine soup is divided between the soup bowls and then a ladleful of the pepper soup is added to eac...
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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...
Vanishing of the Bees Vanishing of the Bees is a film made in 2007 about bees and colony collapse disorder. Here are a couple of links: www.vanishingbees.com and www.vanishingbees.co.uk. I've just added my first widget to my blog! It's from the UK website address above. Why Bees? My rather cursory interest in bees dates back to my primary school days. I must have been nine or ten years of age and was supposed to be working on a project of my choice. A deadline was looming and everyone else seemed to be working away on their projects. I couldn't think of anything and had been told off for my previous project work! Exasperated, my teacher told me to do my project on bees. I remember reading just the one book - and probably copying it. In spite of myself, I became interested in what I was reading. I must have run out of time because I remember getting to the section about bees' dances as a means of communication but not including the information in my project. One of the ...