Eating: July 2008 Archives

Yesterday I made my favourite soup, based on a Nigel Slater recipe. Rather than give you directions based on just what you should buy, I'll give you the organic bag/use what you have method.

A selection of summer vegetables, eg courgette, carrots, tomatoes, peppers (red and yellow, no green please), onions or shallots, and garlic. I like adding butternut as we move into autumn. Also if you add aubergine and thicken with passata you have a great pasta sauce. Leave out the passata and then this is an ovenbaked ratatouille.

So. Back to the soup.

Chop all your veggies, onions into rings, carrots diagonally, tomatoes into wedges, peppers in slices etc etc. Toss in oil or spray with a mister and roast in a big pan for about an hour at 180C.

They'll fill the room with the smell of garlic and roasted tomatoes. When you take them out the oven be ready to tip them into a big pan, and add about a litre of vegetable stock or a bit more depending how thick you like your soup and then simmer for about 20 minutes.

Last night I added two chicken leg joints to the soup as it simmered and once the chicken was cooked removed them from the soup, stripped the meat from the bone, discarded the skin and added the meat back to the soup.

To serve grate parmesan over the top, buy a loaf of turkish bread, spread thickly with butter, dunk, eat and enjoy.

Soul-food in a bowl. 

I have something to say about Nigel Slater's new book, Eating for England, and it's much the same as what I said about Toast. I think his character really shines through with the recipe books, when it's other kinds of writing he comes through a bit tight-lipped spinster auntie.

For a story by someone who's definitely not tight-lipped go and read (and vote) for Jeanne (the Cooksister) at Can You Twist?, an online reality show with six bloggers writing six stories, with one ultimate winner. I love Jeanne's starting line, 'She had never regretted taking him back.'

How can you resist a story that starts with a line like that?

I read Unclutterer. In a quest to declutter my life I clutter my online life reading about how to declutter my life. How's that then? Anyway, quest for a tidy life aside, one of the entries on unclutterer was about wedding dresses.

I have a confession. I still have mine. Not from the second time because I had no dress then, but from the first time when I was 18.

My mom made my dress. It was cream silk with a princess line bodice to disguise what almost passed for a belly. The petticoat underneath was cotton and mom sewed cotton lace onto the edge. The neckline was beaded and sequined and she sewed each one on by hand, painstakingly. I can imagine her sat in the lounge at home, a cigarette burning in the ashtray while she worked on the bodice of the dress that her 18 year old daughter would wear to her shotgun wedding. I never really thought, until now, of how much she must have cared about me to put that much effort into making my dress.

So I still have it. It's in a box in the storage room downstairs with other mementos from my previous life. The evening bag that my gran gave me, diamante and black silk; the costume jewellery, all broken that my aunt passed onto me after gran died. Some other little things that I kept because I'm sentimental (really).

Unclutterer suggests trashing the dress. Taking photographs of it and then getting rid of it. Remaking it into something else. (Not keeping it for your teenage daughter to wear to her own shotgun wedding.)

I love the photos they link to on Trash the Dress.

What do you think? Should I trash my dress?