This soup was plagued with difficulties in the making, which I admit may have somewhat biased me a little against it.  A litany of niggles turned ‘trying out a new soup’ into a severe annoyance – used up the cream I needed for something else, 1/3 of the shallots I bought turned out to be rotten, conflicting recipe instructions and so forth.  I also hate peeling and cutting shallots, even large ones: it just takes forever.

The watercress purée seemed a little superfluous – it had an almost identical flavour to the soup, albeit a litter stronger and with a green note, but there didn’t seem much reason to have it as a topper – you might as well have just added it into the soup… which I think I may do with the leftovers.

All that said, the soup did turn out rather tasty.  It was relatively mild, with mainly a stocky-garlicky taste to it, and very filling for a thin soup.  Making it again, I think I’d just go for onions and cut down a bit on the stock as well as, possibly, adding the watercress directly to the soup just before blending.

A beautiful soup, tasty, but not worth the frustration in making it this time around.  I might try it again another time ;)

We had some good luck concerning the kitten: we took him to the vets and, lo and behold, he was microchipped!  Totally wasn’t expecting that, but glad nonetheless.  The vet phoned us say they’d gotten a number and address and would phone them and get back to us.  Super. Except… that was two and a half weeks ago.

Just as we were beginning to give up getting a hold of his owners as a lost cause we got a phone call from the vets!  They phoned yesterday morning and by 1 o’clock in the afternoon he was gone.  It was all so sudden it seems surreal – as if he wasn’t ever here.

Apparently, our lack of luck with getting a hold of the owner was due to timing problems (night shift worker) and the owner avoiding phone-calls from someone else thus missing ours, too.  The minute it went to a letter, they called the vet right away – surprised that the kitten they’d been missing for a whole month and a half had suddenly turned up!  Apparently they and their family had been out looking for the wee scamp for weeks, worried because they lived near a railway and land where foxes are known to prowl.  Given he’s such a teeny thing (six months old, would you believe!), it would have been easy for a driver not to see him or a bigger critter to get a hold of him.

Having given up on finding him themselves they realised they hadn’t sent away his microchip form.  D’oh.  Still not sure how the microchip company had him on the database – I can only assume they knew which vet had said microchip and traced the owner that way?  If anyone knows how the system works I’d welcome a possible explanation =)

The other surprise came when we found out he’d come from a good few miles away – in Larbert.  We’d not even thought to phone the vets further afield than Camelon assuming that such a teeny tiny cat wouldn’t have walked very far from home.  When he came to us, he looked a little underfed but not starving.  Given that they’d been missing him for six weeks, we’d only had him for three and he seemed to have not gotten into too bad a condition for his size we all wondered if he’d perhaps been taken from Larbert and brought to Camelon by some (possibly) well-meaning stranger who’d found him – only to run off again.

I had wanted to know what his real name was and found out inadvertently when I mentioned that, on finding him, we’d assumed he was a she.  Apparently this wasn’t the first time as originally he’d been called… Millie.  Hehe.  When the truth became apparent, Millie became Mills – a name which has a slight mischevious tilt, to my mind, and suits the wee man well – though I’ll probably always remember him as Cai =)

The place feels rather quiet without him and whilst I won’t miss him trying to eat everything (including my plants) I will miss the wee scamp being a cute addition to the family and generally adding some random to the house.

Sam, on the other hand, with probably be wholly relieved to see the back of the kitten.  Though I do think he was growing on him.  A wee tiny bit. Maybe. ;)

G’bye Mills

Miss ya, wee man.

I’ve been trying to keep to a schedule for writing here  but with my big cousin’s stag party at the weekend… well, lets just say that I was still trying to recover on Monday.  It was a great night, though, and I’m looking forward to his wedding in a couple of weeks time.

Today I was ready to blow the cobwebs away and raring to get out in the garden.  I wasn’t going to allow a torrential downpour bit of drizzle stop me from getting out there.  That’s what wellies and big leather gloves are for, right?  Today’s task was finally getting rid of the radishes.  When I first grey radishes, hoping for little, lovely, salad bowl crunchies I failed miserably.  I could get them to the right size, shape and crunchiness, even but the taste was just horrid.  Not sure where I was going wrong, but the upshot was too many radishes I didn’t want to eat!

So, having heard that radish seed in many ways approximates mustard seed, I figured I’d leave the ones which were left in the ground and see what happened.  For a start, the bees loved them – radishes have a profuse amount of flowers and they actually smell quite nice. This is, unfortunately, the only photo I have of them close-ish up:

The  radishes, left to grow, became huge and some even seemed to have started growing secondary tubers further down the root.

As it turned out, apparently the seeds on mine didn’t taste any good either, so I dug the lot out of the ground today to make space for winter lettuces.  Smashing them up to go in the compost, though, I noticed the coolest thing:  some of them had become hollow and were supporting small colonies of critters and beasties – including worms! Click on the images for a closer view.

Not all of the radishes were hollow, but I’d had no idea they would even do this.  Pretty funky stuff.  Cool as they were, though, their upheaval was a must – giving me space for my winter lettuces:

Not a tonne of space but, then, that’s the story of this garden as a whole.  Still, as the season comes to a close, I feel that I’ve really managed to make a decent go of growing things in my long-thin strip of dirt.  It’s been great fun and I’m already planning what I will (and won’t) grow next year.  For the record, the garden looks like so at the beginning of September:

Coming to a slow close, but not done yet!

On a completely different note, below is what happens when you leave an inquisitive, greedy wee kitten in a room with an empty curry bowl:

Yes, he’s still with us, and getting chubbier by the day.  Just look at that round wee belly!

You’re beginning to see a pattern as to where I get my soup ideas, right?  Of course, this week’s one is another BBC GoodFood one – it’ll take a while to plumb the depths of their soup selection even with a few ‘repeat’ recipes.  Still, if anyone wants to throw a suggestion from another site my way I’d totally appreciate it!

This recipe uses butterbeans.  Dried butterbeans: which you soak overnight and then must peel before using in the soup.  To say this is a tedious task is not even the half of it.  However, I looked to the other commenters, who said that it was worth it and, dubious, watched tv whilst popping beans out of their flimsy shells.  All said, it took me nearly an hour – though I wasn’t going at any great speed, if I’m honest.  Still, it was an impressive pile of discards at the end:

At least I have a compost heap to throw them on, too.  Maybe next year I can grow some of my own from that self-same compost =)

The soup itself is thick, tasty, and not over-seasoned.  If you’re used to salt-and-peppering most soups vigorously I’d strongly suggest holding off on this one – it’s got a superb subtle flavour, especially with the chilli oil, which would, I think, be overwhelmed by too much seasoning – especially salt.  It was, as the commenters on the recipe had said, totally worth the effort to make.  A beautiful soup and none too skimpy a portion.  I’m not sure how often I’d make the effort, but it’s certainly a soup I’d make again.  It’s an impressive soup, in looks as well as taste, and one I wouldn’t hesitate to serve up to guests.

I think these sunflowers stand true to their name:  ‘Tall Yellow’.  They’re definitely tall – I’m 5′ 8″ and in the below picture my arm is at its full extension above my head, putting these stalks at over 8ft skyward!  The flowers, too, are massive – bigger than my hand, though foreshortening makes them seem a tad smaller in the picture and a very nice, bright, sunshine yellow.  Definitely doing what it sez on the tin seed packet.

I only planted three, but they’ve all come up and are a nice late-summer splash of colour in the garden – though only one is flowering so far.  I’m hoping, next year, to plant a row along the fence to break up the orange-red monotony ;)

Peas.  I’ve not been that lucky with my peas this year in the garden, so I couldn’t pull off a pea soup from my own stocks, but I was determined to try this soup (courtesy of my usual go-to site for recipes, BBC GoodFood) anyway.  The topping of fish finger croutons is simply a wonderful extravagance that turns a lunch into dinner.

Unfortunately, this weekend Andy is away to London and has taken our camera with him.  I dragged out my old Kodak EasyShare which was a pretty decent camera for me, back in the days; simple and easy to use…. but slow.  I’m so used to my shiny little Casio Exilim which is pretty speedy, much smaller and less bulky, lighter and has a wider range of features (like decent shake correction for my wobbly hands).  Neither are super-amazing cameras compared to the big shiny DSLR’s that everyone and their auntie has these days, but they’ve both served me well over the years.

Anyway, the upshot of using my old camera was that something weird went on and I didn’t get pictures of the first bowl of soup so I had to have a second – which is why my Saturday Soup post is on a Sunday this week.  As much as I liked the soup, it was way too filling for seconds just to take more pictures!

The one thing I really loved about this soup was being introduced to the idea of part-blending.  I like chunky soups, but I also like ‘thick’, blended soups.  By blending two-thirds of the ingredients and keeping one third aside to add back later, I can have chunky pieces in a blended soup.  Souperb! (ba-dum tsh)

Pesto goes surprisingly well with peas, and gave the soup the necessary oomph.  I added, as the recipe suggested, a bit of fresh (well, frozen) parmesan to increase the flavour of the jarred pesto and was also pretty generous with the black pepper which I felt was needed to bring out some of the flavour of the soup.

This soup is really easy to make, and I think I could happily add it to my repertoire – it’s cheap, filling, makes a decent amount because you don’t need a tonne of it to fill you up, and it’s got a nice flavour which I think would do well in summer or winter.  Potatoes and frozen peas are something I always have around and there’s usually a jar of pesto in the cupboard or fridge – the fish fingers are nice, but totally not a necessity.  If I was making it for an actual dinner, I might serve a small bowl of soup beside a breaded fish fillet and some bread rather than fish fingers, or even do home-made fish fingers but either way it’s a damn nice dish.