The slow cooker chef: Light summery vegetable soup recipe
We should be sylphlike by now. We were gradually shedding the pounds with the new half veggie diet and soup each day for lunch. The dangerous thing about losing weight with little effort is that you can start to take it for granted and assume that whatever you eat will have no effect on your size. Unlike multi national corporations, we didn’t want to grow. Gradually we’ve slithered back to sandwiches for lunch. Chocolate bars, biscuits and the occasional ice cream treat on a hot day have tempted us. “Gosh, you’ve put on...
read moreAsparagus and ricotta tarts sprinkled with lemon zest and parmesan recipe
Although we are in the middle of the asparagus season it wasn’t until last week that I found English asparagus on sale locally. I bought a couple of bunches, put them in a large jug of cold water and forgot about them. I spotted them a few evenings later, looking less than their best so I snapped off the tops and made these savoury tarts. Perhaps it was desperation to get the best possible return on the small harvest that made things move up a gear in the cottage smallholder kitchen. Or possibly the fact that Danny had left a tempting...
read moreFoodies in a hurry: Quick broccoli and stilton soup recipe
Kay who writes the Blue World Gardener blog has inspired me with her suggestion of a store cupboard meal once a week. I reckoned that I needed to fine tune the larder and start practicing immediately. So when I next visited Daily Bread, I popped a bag of dried onions in my basket. My mum used these a lot when I was growing up. In fact, when I left home for university back in the early seventies, she put a carton in my suitcase along with a very handy cook book Cooking in a Bedsitter by Katharine Whitehorn. This little gem of a book came into...
read moreThe slow cooker chef: comes to the rescue. Tasty, easy, low fat leek and potato soup recipe (vichyssoise)
When I pointed out that soup was on offer at Waitrose my mother’s reaction was instant. “Who’d want to eat soup at this time of year?” Well, Danny and me for starters. We’ve stopped eating soup for lunch for the past month or so and now the weighing scales are in danger of collapsing when we step on board. Soup is so easy to make – why does it seem such a palaver? I’ve been working much nearer home so lunch boxes are no longer planned. I swoop home grab some Boston Baked beans, a chunk of polenta bake...
read moreThe slow cooker chef: Sweet potato and acorn squash soup recipe, topped with red Romano pepper, spinach and sweet corn
I had the whole weekend off – the first for weeks. Mainly catching up and tackling a few jobs that have been crying out for months. This afternoon, I lolled in the luxury of a few hours to experiment and make the soup for next week’s lunches. By chance the theme was orange. I made an intense carrot and coriander (cilantro) using an Italian recipe as a starting point and also a sweet potato and acorn squash soup. The latter was inspired by a post on a great blog that I have recently discovered. Clare sometimes comments on the...
read moreThe slow cooker chef: Delicate parsnip soup spiced with Garam Masala recipe
Parsnips were on sale – 2 for 1 in Tesco’s last week. Great, I thought, I’ll make parsnip soup. The parsnips had knocked about on the larder floor for so long that even Danny had given up asking what I was going to do with them. It was time to make the soup. When D was secreted in the Rat Room upstairs, I peeled, diced and popped them into the slow cooker with some rich chicken stock, onions and a teaspoon of Garam Masala. I love this light combination of spices, not too overpowering to kill the sweetness of the parsnips....
read moreThe slow cooker chef: Carnivores on a budget soup recipe
Cayenne pepper is not something I have used very much over the years. In fact, until last week, we were using a jar that I had bought when I moved into my first flat in 1979. It was just sprinkled on egg mayonnaise as a garnish. It still smelt spicy to me. Cayenne seems to be a handy ingredient for vegetarian dishes so in two weeks we used the final 95% of the small vintage canister. When I opened a new jar I instantly twigged that we were dealing with a much livelier beast. I was using our new slow cooker to make soup for Danny’s lunch...
read moreSkinflint soup recipe: broccoli stalk, last week’s courgettes and post Christmas Stilton combine and rule
I hate throwing out the thick broccoli (calibrese) stalks. The Penultimate Paramour used to chop them and use them in stir fries but they always tasted a bit rough and to be quite honest, stalky. They are tough miniature tree trunks and probably needed a bit more time than a quick whisk in a hot pan. This morning I tottered downstairs. Before you could say “bacon sandwich” I was chopping an onion. I had an hour before leaving for work. The broccoli stalk was going to be the heart of a tasty soup. Poking about in the fridge I found...
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