That’s me back on the soup again. And all the better for it.
It’s a good way of getting veg in your diet.
Particularly if your gastric juices dry up when confronted by the sight and smell of a big mound of earthy green stuff on your dinner plate, next to your Quorn sausage roll.
If you’re the sort of sybarite who adds ham, beef or chicken to your soup, you don’t need the industrial amounts so often ingested with meat and two veg.
It’s been 20,00 years of soup
I believe it might make a chap a little slimmer too, particularly if he breathes in and avoids looking in the mirror. Why do mirrors always get it wrong?
According to top brothologists, soup has been simmering away for 20,000 years.
The continuity is comforting, and I like to think of our ancient ancestors being just like us, stirring a big pot of minestrone.
Or, if they didn’t have the ingredients yet for that, some grass and bark, flavoured with gravel and the bone of someone from another tribe.
It’s a winter thing
A fairly primitive fellow myself, I stopped making soup for a couple of years, I think one summer (it’s more of a winter warmer) and, when I took it up again, the results were initially disastrous.
I’m still limited with it but, eventually, you hit on a formula, which is fine if you don’t mind having the same one over and over again.
Lentils are the key to mine. Without them, I can’t get the consistency right.
Not rice, not pasta…
I’m thinking of experimenting with split peas, but can’t summon up the courage.
I’ve tried rice to thicken soup, but it then becomes too, er, ricey.
Pasta goes soggy. Spaghetti certainly doesn’t work, at least not without a bib the size of Wales.
One thing I learned was not to stint on the lentils.
I used to put in a relatively small amount, thinking to make this little bag of pulses last for three or four huge pots. Naw!
You don’t want a watery sea
Get most of it bunged in there. It’s better than using too much ready-made, packet stuff to thicken things up.
Just a couple of cubes in a huge pot usually takes care of the flavouring for me.
You don’t want your soup to be a bunch of solids in a watery sea.
Nor do you want it so thick you need to eat it with a fork and knife.
I’ll be quite candid with you here and confess that some soups I’ve made have gone straight into the bin.
That usually happens when I try adding anything new or different.
Chucking in everything doesn’t work either
I used to just chuck in everything: carrot, onion, mushroom, tatties, cabbage, pie, apples, sausage roll, dishcloth, beard exfoliator.
It didn’t always work, to be honest.
Now I’m more measured, basically carrot, onion and just a very small dollop of anti-dandruff shampoo.
The last magic ingredients
Salt is crucial to a good soup and hard to get right, but you learn to judge it in the end.
Then, if you’re lucky it’ll all turn oot just right, particularly if you leave it a day to settle doon.
After that, you just need a good dod of proper, thick bread to dip in it.
And that’ll be you: bowled over by soup!
