Monday's medley of soup

After a leisurely start to the day it was all systems go to equip the garden. The leisurely start included reading an old book – I’m sure I’m enjoying it more because it smells old.

The equipping of the garden first involved removal of junk from the boot of my car at the dump. This included:

1. An enormous and cute, but slightly mouldy teddy bear, that had been freed from our loft by my cousin, Alastair, in January. It had been sat around in a black sack in various locations since as I had been intending to fettle it up with a trip to the launderette but finally thought better of it.
2. A whole load of VHS tapes which I had discovered whilst spring re-arranging (more enjoyable than spring cleaning) yesterday. Both mine and Matt’s and none of them viewed in at least the last 7 years.
3. My condemned sandwich toaster.

Items 1 and 2 disposed of according to plan. Item 3 disposed of causing Matt great hilarity. Today I was fulfilling the role of dumping whilst Matt watched from the car. This is often beneficial as the men at the dump are generally quite keen to help ladies with their dumping. I was duly assisted with items 1 and 2 but today the electrical waste was unmanned.

Taking health and safety seriously I called out before throwing the sandwich toaster into the skip to check that there was no-one inside it. There was no response so I went ahead with the launch of the sandwich toaster. Unfortunately I didn’t launch with quite enough force and the sandwich toaster rebounded from the side of skip, plug flailing and narrowly avoiding my head. It was whilst I was picking up the bits that Matt wound down the car window and told me, between fits of laughter, to walk round the other side of the skip. Where the side was down and I could just place in the sandwich toaster with no risk of head injury.

A successful trip to the garden centre ensued and 8 terracotta, mosaic encrusted pots later we began the return journey. Matt had seat belted the larger pots into the back seats with the rest in the boot so there was limited capacity for shopping from a “luxury” supermarket. One of the best things about said luxury supermarket is that when they reduce things they do really good reductions. Today’s best bargain was watercress and I picked up 4 packets. I also picked up a packet of reduced salad which when put together with some reduced beetroot, the remaining salmon & prawn leftovers and a homemade dressing made a very nice lunch.

After lunch it was back out to another garden centre where we successfully equipped ourselves with garden tables (that sort of match the pots) and a hose. And what appears to me to be an extravagant hose attachment but Matt assures me that we will not regret it.

Once home I needed to turn the watercress into soup while it was still nice. I think that potato is the traditional thickening to go with this but I prefer lentils to add some protein.

Realising that we’d had watercress in the lunchtime salad I thought that I should mix up the day’s flavours, I decided to make another sort of soup too. I got a leek and potato one on the go. 

Then I thought: why stop at two? We had eaten the last portion of frozen soup yesterday (the parsnip and apple one) so there was scope for restocking.

One of my other luxury supermarket bargains was a pot of sun ripened tomatoes and I thought I’d try these with some slightly wrinkling peppers. Having started to heat some olive oil to sauté an onion I noticed that there was quite a bit of oil in the tomato pot and not wanting to waste this I got out another pan and heated that instead.

So now I had a spare pan with olive oil and the only logical thing was to use this to make another soup. I had used up nearly all of the fresh vegetables in the house but there were still some carrots. And I had a little knobble of ginger so decided to try carrot and ginger. To improve the flavour I oven roasted the carrots before adding to the onion and ginger. Whilst the carrots were roasting and I was pondering this creation I felt inspired to add orange juice. This would be the perfect opportunity to use up the oranges and satsumas etc that had been sat, unloved, for a good long while (some I fear since 2012) in the fruit bowl. This is because I love nice citrus and am often tempted to buy. But if I buy a pack, eat one and it’s disappointing then it puts me off the rest. But I hate wasting food so the citrus stay there. (If it’s nice the whole lot may well get devoured in one sitting.) Matt can usually be counted on to help consume food but he isn’t keen on oranges due to the peeling issue (not that I’ve ever perceived that as a particular issue). So I was pleased to be able to squeeze some semi-decent juice out of my languishing fruits, which I added with some stock and red lentils to the other ingredients.

The tomatoey-peppery soup was looking rather insubstantial so I added a tin of tomatoes to that. And some red lentils.

Once all the soups were blended up (separately) we faced the dilemma of which to eat tonight. Matt went for the watercress (with a dollop of crème fraiche) – I am told it was scrumptious. I went for the carrot / ginger / orange. It too was scrumptious. I think that I’ll call it velvet carrot soup as the lentils gave it a gorgeous texture (although I did miss a few bits of carrot in the blending process).

Now I’ve just got to find enough containers to freeze it all. And replenish the lentils. 

Saturday's cabbage

The savoy cabbage is one of those vegetables that I have convinced myself is very healthy and good value. But when it comes to actually eating it seems to be remarkably un-inspiring. So I resigned myself to the fact that we would be eating some sort of soupy / brothy thing or a stir-fry this evening with a cabbage that was looking increasingly sorry for itself.

The day flew by but when looking back it’s not entirely clear that very much actually happened. I almost signed up to a store card but backed out when they said I couldn’t set up a direct debit to pay the full amount each month. They offered me the option of an old fashioned statement which I would have to organise to pay or a direct debit for a set amount and then arrange to pay the rest or accumulate interest. Either seemed liable to be a disaster.

Returned from said store and I made use of some lovely March sunshine creating the “Mediterranean” bit of the garden. By which I mean planting some herbs around the olive tree (actually spotted an olive!) and repotting the bay tree. Hopefully this will all survive next week’s predicted snow and soon I should be cooking with home grown flavourings.

After a quick lunch consisting of a bowl of my favourite crinkle cut salt and vinegar crisps I managed to get a good swim in today. The main hazard facing me was hoards of teenagers windmilling their arms on the poolside. It was some sort of regatta (if that’s the word for a swimming competition) and this apparently amounts to warming up.

I was certainly ready for dinner. But rather than choosing the straightforward option (the stir-fry had been on my mind most of the afternoon) I thought I would see if there was something more exciting to create. Two of my books had recipes for stuffed cabbage leaves so I figured that I could give that a go. Neither of them sounded brilliant but didn’t seem too complicated so I decided to go freestyle….

The obvious thing to stuff the cabbage leaves with would be rice. But I am useless at cooking rice and my husband, Matt, who usually does this task was out on a DIY-based mission. So I opted for pearl barley. This tends to work out best if rinsed before cooking and since I had just used the colander to rinse the cabbage leaves prior to blanching (it defeats me why this is called blanching, but there we are, and blanche I did) I chucked a cup or so into said colander (in an effort to reduce washing up). My misjudgement of the relative size of pearl barley and the holes in the colander resulted in pearl barley spattering all around the sink area so I had to revert to a sieve anyway. I decided that the whole thing could do with a bit of protein so chucked in a cup or so of puy lentils with the pearl barley and set them to simmer.

It struck me that the whole thing would need some sort of sauce. So I cooked up an onion, a couple of sticks of celery and a couple of carrots and then at a loss of what else to do threw in a can of chopped tomatoes. And on a whim I added some red wine vinegar and a teaspoon of brown sugar. And then decided that it would be better blended. By now Matt had come home and as well as cooking rice he tends to do most kitchen tasks that involve the use of a power tool and thus we had a nice tomato sauce and a spattered worktop.

I had evidently made a huge overestimation of how much stuffing each cabbage leaf would take but, determined not to waste my pearl barley and lentils, piled on the filling. And then tried to roll. Resulting in a lot of pearl barley and lentils joining the tomato sauce on the worktop, and a bit on the floor too. The leaves just wouldn’t be rolled. I had images of tying them up with string. But had no suitable string. So the only solution I could come up with was to “pin” them shut with cocktail sticks.

After arranging in an ovenproof dish I poured the tomato sauce (which miraculously was just the right quantity) over the stuffed cabbage leaves. Still not convinced on the outcome of this dish I grated over little bit of cheese (my culinary cure-all) before putting the whole lot to bake in the oven at 180°C for about half an hour.

And after careful removal of the cocktail sticks we tucked in. Matt declared it   a  “triumph”. It was yummy but if I was doing it again I wouldn’t bother with the cabbage leaves. I’d just make the pearl barley / lentil mix and serve with tomato sauce.

Which I guess means we’re back to soup or stir-fry for the savoy cabbage.