Season of soups and warming stewpot foods. (Apologies to John Keats!)
It’s that time of year again when you turn from crisp salads to more comforting dishes. So last week I made mushroom soup for the first time in ages. Yesterday I made garlic soup, with potatoes and saffron. This is supposed to be very good for you, boosting your immune system and that kind of thing. But tasty too!
Because it involves a lot of garlic and this needs simmering for best part of an hour, the aroma of garlic permeated the house, not terribly pungent but there as a kind of background smell. When our daughter and children arrived to go for a walk, I opened the door ( purely to acknowledge their arrival outside, I hasten to add, not to invite them in as we are not supposed to mingle two households!!) the smell must have wafted outdoors because her four year old asked, “What can I smell?” “Grandma’s garlic soup,” was the answer.
I was reminded of an occasion, long years ago when I used to try to teach French to catering students. These were advanced caterers, bright and perky, not behind the door at all, just not given to an academic career. Now these students were not known for their reticence or tactfulness. I had made my garlic soup over the weekend and went to teach them on the Monday. As I stood at the door to welcome their arrival - Bonjour! Ça va? - one after another they paused and asked, “Has someone been eating garlic?” I denied all knowledge, of course. Now I think back and wonder if I should have engaged with them in a discussion of the merits of cooking with garlic, used the opportunity to give them some extra French vocabulary. It would have been more interesting for me than cuts of meat and terminology that I would never use in a month of Sundays. But my curriculum content was strictly controlled by the Catering Department, as was the pass rate: no failures permitted, a certain percentage of distinctions and merits and, the smallest group, just a handful of mere passes! Already almost thirty years ago there was some juggling of figures!
That is all the past, and here I am thinking about soup. More mushroom soup is on the cards. I always used to make a chicken and onion soup, using the carcass of the chicken whenever I did a roast chicken dinner. I am no longer doing roast chicken dinners as the family cannot come round and share it. Even a very small bird goes a long way when there are only two of you eating it. But I shall pick up a range of root vegetables, maybe at Wednesday’s market, and make a vegetable soup to keep us going.
A nice crisp salad will also feature as a regular thing, despite summer being over.
The columnist Zoe Williams, while expressing her praise for schools taking her children off her hands again, was also writing about food, specifically the difficulties of making packed lunches:-
“So we’re in the world of the packed lunch, which is a ball-ache but also unearths a lot of childhood trauma. My mum had no understanding of the concept “portable”. She thought anything was a sandwich so long as it was between two bits of bread. She once made me one of ratatouille, which turned into a kind of artisanal soup in my bag, and I bet you’re thinking that sounds quite tasty, bloody Guardian reader, and perhaps it would have been if I hadn’t had to lick it off my pencil case. My best friend’s mum once sent her in with an egg that she had forgotten to boil. We thought the two progenitors may have been involved in some pranking competition.”
I like the idea of ratatouille sandwiches but I guess some things are not really meant to go between rounds of bread.
When our son was small he was a picky eater, to say the least, and school dinners were just not a realistic option. So we settled for a small flask of tomato soup. He did not object to having the same thing every day. (That’s the way of picky eaters. I remember my mother preparing a meal of mashed potato and minced beef for my picky eater brother almost every day for years, no matter what was being served for the rest of the family. We three sisters were apparently not picky eaters and so did not get special treatment!) All went well until the day our son came home and told me he had not had his soup as there was something wrong with it; it had come out sort of grey and gritty. Just as well he did not eat it as the thermos flask had shattered internally, mixing itself in with the soup! Horrors!
That’s enough about food.
On the radio news I am hearing that exams are to go ahead in the UK this academic year. This is considered to be the fairest measure. Discussions will take place to decide what to do if exams are disrupted again as they were this year. Forward planning? We shall see.
I still wait to hear what will go on with the much vaunted and slightly leaked three tier system for general restrictions. One of my neighbours fully expects her twin granddaughters to lose their jobs in a local pub. Apparently an announcement is due to be made early this evening. But something needs to be done as numbers of covid cases in hospitals, especially here in the North, are going up. A reporter on the radio news is currently telling me that numbers are going up,in the South as well. Only the Southwest, heading towards Land End seems to be escaping.
Oh my goodness!
But life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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