S#74: The Old Fashioned Way

As you know, soup grows in tiny little tins on a soup tree. The tins ripen and turn metallic, and then they’re picked and sold in the tin-tree aisle of your local supermarket. Today I chose to make a different kind of soup – the kind from Actual Vegetables.

I confess I’ve made home-made soup before, but only since last year. As a result, the process still fills me with wonder. In this photo, you can see green lentils in the glass jar, and the result of adding them to soup in the glass lidded bowl: green soup (despite having a whole pumpkin in it). In a moment of foolishness, I bought a huge pack of carrots lately (Why? I don’t know). In order to get rid of the carrots, I bought all the other vegies you see here:

I was determined that THIS time, I’d have orange-coloured soup. So I used no green ingredients whatsoever (I used chickpeas instead of lentils, since both are a fabulous source of protein and I didn’t feel like red lentils). I chopped and fried the onion with garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander and tumeric. (Cumin and coriander are anti-farting ingredients, as I discovered during research for my children’s book “Farting my ABCs”. Tumeric is an extremely powerful dye, but you can remove it from benchtops with baking soda and white vinegar.) The stock needs to be dissolved in boiling water, so I did that and mixed it in before adding everything else and boiling it for over half an hour (the pot in the background is the chickpeas, since I bought dried ones and I like to hydrate them by boiling, but wasn’t sure they’d cope with everything else boiling in the same pot). Later on, I added a tomato too (why not?)

My friend Ann tasted it and said, “That’s not nearly as disgusting as I expected.” (Thanks Ann!) I should probably explain that she doesn’t like pumpkin soup.

And of course I put sour cream on top.

Definitely orange – yay!

Since I followed the soup with a ham, beetroot, avocado and cheese sandwich (and a mushroom), I had literally ten different vegies in the space of half an hour. That’s a world record in the life of Louise.

In other good news, I cut up the whole pumpkin without slicing myself once. Hurrah! For the weak/uncoordinated, I recommend butternut over regular pumpkin any day.

Play along at home: All you really need is a pumpkin and some stock (plus whatever else is lingering in your fridge – hopefully an onion). Boil, blend, and eat!

Coming super soon: Wear a tiara, sarcastic dream diary, build a fort. . . and more.

And one last mention of the reverse burglary saga:

 Ben! Beardy Ben. Sarcastic Ben. Funny Ben. It’s you. Your sister let me in when I knew you were out.

Go thou and eat.