Soup's Up!

My darling daughter, Jenny, is not one of life's natural cooks, and only tackles cooking with a good cook book and scales to hand. She follows a recipe to the letter yet is not always successful. She has her favourite Mary Berry Cook Book and has some success with various recipes from it. Me? I'm the 'oh that looks about right' type of cook - scales? why bother? A few spoonfuls of this and a glug of that will do. So when Jen asked me to make an onion soup from the book I said 'yes of course', when what I meant was 'I'll give it a try'. I checked the list of ingredients and popped out to the local Tesco Express. I did not have any bay leaves so substituted mixed herbs instead. I got some stilton but I could not remember the quantity needed so bought a chunk and hoped for the best. Onions were no trouble! :) I did follow the method even if some of the quantities were guessed at. It proved surprisingly quick and easy and ended up pretty tasty, if a little salty. I think the main reason for this is I use hardly any salt in cooking, and the recipe required stock so I used two knorr veggie stock cubes in 1.5 pints of water and  then added most of the slab of stilton which was a bit more than the recipe suggested. So it was salty to my taste buds but Jen was happy with the end result. The onions were in medium-small chunks and not blitzed so it was a lumpy soup. I am sure you could blend it if you prefer a smooth creamy soup.
I have just made my third batch of soup and did not use stock cubes at all. Jen complained the first batches were peppery, and, as I had not added a speck of pepper, it had to have come from the stock cubes. I hope she likes this lot and remembers to bring home her thermos flask to use it for soup for lunch this week. I found the ubiquitous Chinese take away boxes very useful for Jen to take soup to work in and re-heat in the microwave at work. Jen has a mild gluten intolerance and has to watch her intake of bread, pastry and pasta. She is ok with one roll, or 2 thin slices of bread for a sandwich but any more than that and she starts bloating up like a balloon. She seems ok with fresh egg pasta but dried pasta has to be used in very small quantities.

Monday is pub quiz night and it's the one night in the week when we manage to get together as a family. Jen, James and myself, plus a couple of friends make up our little team and have most topics covered. Jen and James are great on celebrity stuff and current tv programmes and movies. Kev is brilliant on music, history, geography and food and drink (he's a chef!) and I cover most other topics :) Our one weakness is sport, particularly football! None of us like it or follow it so changes of player or manager leave us cold, and we don't know which stadium is where or who plays there. Luckily we usually only get one football question a week, and sometimes none! We do well on minority sports and quirky ones.
It's just us three tonight, plus maybe an ex member of the team who has not been to the quiz for over a year. Glynne popped over for coffee last week and it was good to catch up. He's another of my friends who is unemployed and looking. He is over 60 and struggling to get anything more than a few hours a week part time care work. He does enjoy this though and it is done officially and within the guide lines so he does not lose the benefits he gets. I hope he comes tonight because it's always a good laugh with him around.
The sun is sinking low in the sky so I am off to the park with Honey for her walkies (running) and my stroll (crawl). It looks like a lovely sunset tonight :)

PS Jeanette it's a chilly 7 degrees here but dry and bright. Hope it's nice and warm there in Spain :) ... Spain... :| .... warm sunshine ...:( ... *sob*