Minnie's Soup Kitchen

"Penny" Soup Today I made my first The Soup Book soup in 2014 - it's also the 169th soup from that book that I've made. Ingredients: a leek, potatoes, carrots, small sweet potatoes, vegetable stock and parsley (from the garden, even though it's January). Preparation: basically, slice the vegetables into thin rounds. Cooking: sweat the vegetables, pour in the stock, simmer until all the vegetables tender; liquidise some of the vegetables with a little of the liquid. To serve: stir in the parsley, pour the soup into the bowls and make a little stack of sliced vegetables in the centre. The bliss of a day off on a weekday! I woke up thinking it was my usual wake-up time: "Oh no! I'm awake! I'll never get back to sleep." Then I discovered it was 8 o'clock, not 6 o'clock. I began the day in a good mood. My friend Bella was coming for lunch and I was pleased to have a new soup taster. I had the soup ready in good time for ...

Dhal Soup On Friday 3rd January (the older offspring's birthday, by the way) I went through The Soup Book and made a list of the thirty-two soups I have yet to make. Will I get through them this year? Let us see. Following the post-Christmas cull of moss-clad cookery books, I cast my eye over the kitchen book shelves this morning (Saturday 4th January) in search of soup recipes.  Rose Elliot' s Not Just a Load of Old Lentils was first published in 1972 and the spouse and I bought our copy in 1984. We went vegetarian that year in an effort to lose weight and be healthy. It didn't last. We missed meat and we found that preparing truly tasty vegetarian meals was too time consuming and not always worth the effort. That said, we gained a lot from the experience. The ingredients for this dhal soup: red lentils, a bay leaf, sliced onions, crushed garlic, ginger (I used fresh rather than ground), turmeric, garam masala and lemon juice. Cooking: I simmered the lentils,...