Weird Soup: Sweet potato, carrot and lettuce. Yes, lettuce.

Yesterday, Cowboy and I bought a bed. A real one. A new one! It's king size, we can barely open the bathroom door now, but by golly did we sleep well last night. No more lumpy, bumpy, tipping-us-out-of-bed futon. Thank goodness.

The best part is that we bought the bed from Goodwill, and the whole set up - frame, box springs and mattress - was just $550. It's nothing special, but it will tide us over until we have saved up for a good bed.

I made weird soup today. Here's how it goes (and sorry for the awful quality photos, taken on my iPhone with zero good lighting in my teeny tiny kitchen):

Catch a serious cold from your cowboy boyfriend (fiance... psh, details), and crave soup with curry and and orange colour to it.

Find two sweet potatoes and four carrots in your fridge. Perfect! Soften half a big onion in some butter in a big pan while you chunk up the carrots and sweet potatoes.

Find a romaine lettuce in your fridge that has seen better days, and blame the cold medicine while you chop that up and throw it in the pan too. What on earth was I thinking?

Fry everything for a few minutes to get the juices going. Wonder what just possessed you to put lettuce in soup.

Add a good twist of black pepper, a generous shake of curry powder, and for whatever reason, I also threw in a bit of nutmeg - probably out of habit.

Cook the spices for a moment, then add some chicken stock because you don't have anything else to hand. I used just enough to cover all of the vegetables and get them all cooked through.

Make a cup of tea and watch the cat play with a wasp for a while. He really is getting big these days.

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Cut yourself a generous piece of red velvet cake and discover that Netflix now has The Pioneer Woman's cooking show. Sit down on your sofa and forget about your soup completely.

Remember the soup about twenty five minutes later.

Remove it from the heat and blend it up, whilst saying a small prayer to the household gods of soup that it doesn't come out green, or worse, brown. I just bought a hand held Kitchenaid stick blender at Costco yesterday for a bargainous $24. I love Costco.

Say thanks to the household gods that the soup has come out a lovely golden orange colour. Wish that you had added more curry, and some cumin when you'd started, and add those things. It also needed salt and more black pepper. Say another thank you to the household gods that the soup doesn't taste of lettuce at all, it just tastes delicious and sweet and spicy and warm and happy.


Success!

Apologise to Cowboy when he comes home just as you've finished cooking and gets hit with the smell of curry, which he doesn't appreciate. At least it covers up the smell of infected feet that he has brought home after going shoeing.

I am excited to eat this soup later with some crusty bread. I hope you are excited too!



Here's the short form:

2 medium sized sweet potatoes
4 carrots
1 romaine lettuce
1/2 large onion
1 tbl butter
Approx 1 pint chicken stock
1 tsp cumin
1-2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Slice up the onion and soften in the butter. Cube up the carrots, peel and cube the sweet potatoes, and chop up the lettuce, and add them all to the pan. Stir to coat with butter and allow to fry for a few minutes. Add the cumin, curry and nutmeg, and salt and pepper. Cook for a further 2-3 minutes. Add chicken stock and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20-25 minutes or until the root vegetables are soft. Remove from the heat and blend. Season to taste.

Spinach soup, rawhide, and a comedy of errors

The last few days have seen a series of errors on my part. Some were innocuous enough: turning up to the wrong class at university because I thought I was in Group 2 (like all of last year) and I'm actually in Group 1. Others were marginally more serious: discovering that the reason my company hasn't been receiving mail as promptly as it should is because somebody put the wrong address on the website. And that somebody was me.

Anyway, no lasting harm done. I spent a rainy afternoon in the kitchen, where I promptly made this error:



I was peeling a potato, happily thinking about good it was that we only have a cheap peeler and there's no danger of peeling through half a fingernail like I've seen other people do. I immediately peeled through half of my fingernail.

Once I had jumped around the kitchen, sworn a few times, stuck the nail back down and trussed it up in first aid supplies, I got back to cooking, and made this lovely spinach, nutmeg and potato soup. Souper (sorry) simple, delicious and terribly good for you. There are no photos of the process because I was concentrating on not peeling any more fingernails.



Chunk up one onion, two peeled potatoes (do not peel your fingernail off whilst peeling potatoes), and fry in some oil over medium heat. Add around half a litre of vegetable stock (I like Kallo, it's less salty than others), and let it simmer for about ten minutes to soften the potatoes. Then cram in as much spinach as you can muster. I had a big bag of true spinach - the sort with huge leaves and long stalks, not the baby kind you get in supermarkets - which needed eating, and I just threw all of it in there. It was probably a good 400g, maybe more.

Put the lid on the saucepan for a little bit to get the steam into the spinach to help it wilt. When it's soft enough, stir it into the water with the potato and onion and give it another few minutes. Remove from the heat and blend it up. Season well with lots of black pepper and fresh ground nutmeg, and it will likely need a good amount of salt too. Give it a few tastes and adjust as you like it. The potato bulk makes this soup quite thick, which is how I like soup, but you could make it go further and thin it out with more stock if you wanted to.

I'm trying to cut back on my plastic waste (First World Guilt), so instead of my usual method of freezer bags, I portioned it out into three Kilner jars and stuck these in the freezer. Make sure your soup has cooled completely before you freeze it in glass containers, to prevent cracks. Mine appear to be intact. Phew!



In the meantime, Cowboy has a new project on his grubby hands. This, my friends, is a cow hide:



He's been commissioned to make some custom tack for a few riders in his area, out of braided rawhide, so the first step is to obtain a cow hide from the butcher, and stretch it out somewhere far from where you live to keep the stink away. He's borrowing a friend's barn for the process. I have no idea what you do next.

In other news, the banana oat cookies freeze wonderfully in freezer bags, and defrost nicely inside the plastic bag (guilt). They still taste soft and delicious once thawed. Hurrah!