Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Mexican Chilli Bean Soup As I was leafing through The Soup Book the other day and looking at recipes I have yet to cook, I spotted Angela Nilsen 's recipe for Mexican chilli bean soup. I read the ingredients (onion, red pepper, garlic, minced beef, cumin, chilli powder, oregano, plum tomatoes, stock, kidney beans, etc) and it crossed my mind that I had made this soup before. I have gone through my records (i.e., my notes made in my copy of the book, this blog and my spreadsheet) and can't track it, but I still think I've made it. The cumin and oregano are interestingly different flavours to this household's usual chilli con carne recipe taken from our M&S cookery book which the spouse and I have owned since the 1980s (our edition was published in 1983, to be precise). Anyway, the only item I didn't have at home was the red pepper so I went down to Stephen's to buy one. The recipe specified a small pepper but there were only large ones on display. I decide...

Mixed Fungi Soup Today The Soup Book opened practically unaided at this soup recipe! I had planned to make a soup using the stock the spouse made last month from the left-over crudites from our party. (Parsimony or good house keeping?) The ingredients include onion, garlic, flat-leaf parsley (I used the curly-leafed variety available in my garden. I'm a rebel, me. It's there, it's free and the slugs haven't dragged themselves out of the compost bin to feast on it yet), mixed wild mushrooms and nutmeg. The spouse had expressed an interest in going to the farmers' market up in Marlay Park (www.dublintourist.com/details/marlay_park.shtml) and I reminded him about the Dublin Food Co-op (see my blog of 4th March; www.dublinfood.coop/). So then a discussion ensued about which market to go to. The spouse, the younger offspring and I ended up heading into Newmarket Square, me armed with my copy of The Soup Book in case I couldn't get a mix of mushrooms and needed t...