Alice Zaslavsky’s Georgian-spiced carrot, sweet potato and lentil soup – recipe

Amber alert: Alice Zaslavsky’s Georgian-spiced carrot, sweet potato and lentil soup. Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian

In one of my favourite recent releases by a Georgian-born author, Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard by a Great Forest, the protagonist is told that meeting a Georgian outside Georgia is so rare it’s akin to winning the lottery. “Because the odds of winning the lotto are much better. You could have been a millionaire, my friend. Instead, you met me.”

There are fewer than 6 million Georgians in the world, with a third scattered across the diaspora. Australia’s Georgian-born population now sits just under a thousand, of which my family makes up 0.8%.