Tag Archives: onions

A Good Soup Day

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Time is slipping by and my good intentions are going with it. They always do. Julia cooked again tonight, or, to be accurate, heated up the soup she made yesterday and made egg mayonnaise sandwiches. We have enough filling to make egg sandwiches tomorrow too.

The soup was carrot and squash (carrots from ASDA, squash from a neighbour). It had quite a lot of chilli in it. It was spicy enough to wake me up, but stayed within the bounds of acceptability. In my younger days I would test myself against chillies, but these days I prefer to enjoy my food rather than compete against it. It’s a little bit annoying when she hardly ever makes soup but just throws a few things together and makes it better than I do.

I will have to cook tomorrow, and am thinking of pizza. Not very adventurous, but we have pizza bases and I have no inspiration. We do have plenty of carrots though, so I may try something new. I don’t see why thin slices of root vegetable won’t work on pizza . . .

I may think about that before I try it. I have ordered our ASDA shopping for Friday and if we get parsnips this week I may try that pizza, though I may just try a vegetable bake instead. I can’t believe that I just said “if we get parsnips”. What sort of world is this? Are we back in 1940. We ran short of onions in 1940, you know,  It seems strange, but even in 1940 we were buying  a lot of food from abroad (as we were in 1914). It takes a war to make people concentrate on food security, then we let it all slip again. Of course, we now have so many people it would be difficult to feed everyone. Even if we could feed everyone it wouldn’t quite work as we couldn’t, for instance, grow rice. It seems we might, however, be able to grow durum wheat in the eastern counties and make our own pasta. (The hagberg number they talk about is a measure of its suitability for baking – the higher the better. It’s  a farmer thing. At harvest they talk of little else other than yield, moisture and hagbergs).

An older humorous postcard for today –  Great War vintage.

 

Day 55

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My apologies to all. I have been busy and have fallen behind with my reading. I will therefore be launching a reading campaign tonight, but comments may be short and banal. This isn’t too far from my normal standard, but I thought I’d get my apologies in first.

Same for the brown potato soup. It is not my best, but it is acceptable for someone working in the cold and requiring warmth and nourishment at mid-day. It is healthy and free of additives. It was, I confess, meant to be celery soup but having over-softened (burnt) the onions and added what seems to have been too much potato, the result is a reminder to look at more recipes. If at first you don’t succeed, rename the recipe. The plan was to add Stilton cheese, but I may wait until I produce a soup where you can taste the celery. No point throwing good ingredients after bad.

Tonight’s cauliflower was huge. I couldn’t cut steaks as it would have needed a machete, and I’m not sure we could manage a whole one. Not sure what we will be eating for the next few days (I’m back to a no menu/no clue situation) but I’m fairly sure it’s going to feature cauliflower.

Anyway, it’s time for the cheese sauce now, and a nice healthy meal of oven-roasted parsnips, carrots and leeks with cauliflower and cheese sauce. I’m resigned to, rather than enthusiastic about our new vegetarian lifestyle, but sometimes you have to do these things. It cheap, it’s healthy, it’s better for the planet, and it’s possibly more moral (I really don’t have a problem with killing animals to eat them). Whether it’s more fun, I wouldn’t like to say.

 

How does weather affect your mood?

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The title is another from the random subject generator. It’s not quite random because I refused the first one – “Describe an Ornament”. We have a house full of clutter and I don’t want to remind myself of it by describing one particular piece.

So, how does the weather affect my mood? Obviously I feel good when the weather is good and less good when the weather is bad. That was an easy one.

I’m rapidly losing faith in the random subject generator.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Here is a selection of messages written on tiles in the Mencap garden.

I’ll be able to return to posts with more pictures tomorrow because I’ve bought a new card reader from ASDA. I nearly had breakfast while I was there, despite the memory of it being  fairly rank last time I had it. The service was so slow my knee gave way while I was standing in the slow-moving, and slightly mutinous, queue so I left. This was, I’m pretty sure, a blessing in disguise.

I finally had breakfast in the square at Newark – two Lincolnshire sausages in a bun with fried onions and brown sauce. It was very tasty, and much better than ASDA. The resulting mess demonstrated my wisdom in selecting shirts in food-coloured check patterns. After scraping up the spilt onions you could hardly see the mark.