soup

We had falsche Suppen for lunch.  For a long time I believed that only echte Suppen, soup made with real meat stock, was worth bothering about, and it is true that some of my stockless vegetable soups did taste a great deal too much like boiled vegetables floating in hot water with Marigold powder.  But the tomatoes in my greenhouse finally started to crop, and a couple of days ago as I looked at the two punnets of accumulated tomatoes in the fridge, the pot of basil on the kitchen window sill valiantly sprouting again for the fourth time, and the open bag of slightly flabby carrots, I decided that something must be done, and that they had the makings of lunch.

I surreptitiously ate the very first tomato that I picked, instead of presenting it to the Systems Administrator in triumph, and it was not honestly awfully good.  Not especially tomato flavoured, and mysteriously woolly.  The SA meanwhile resolutely ignored the filling punnets in the fridge, and continued to buy tomatoes from Waitrose.  Hence the need for home made tomato soup.

This time round I left Marigold powder out of the equation.  I have come to the conclusion that when in doubt about savoury food, the answer is generally an onion.  I sliced two small ones, one each, and fried them gently until they were soft and an appetising shade of caramel brown.  Then I added a carrot, diced, and sweated it with the onions, then a punnet of tomatoes, and in a fit of inspiration a dash of green lentils.  Not too many, as I was aiming at soup, not dal, but I thought they'd thicken things up and add an earthy base note.  It didn't need much extra water with the juice from the tomatoes, but I added some and simmered it until the lentils were tender, then allowed it to cool.  Just before lunchtime I liquidised it and reheated it with a generous handful of torn basil leaves, then stirred in a swirl of single cream that was left over from something else.

It was very nice soup, so much so that today I did another one, using up some left over mushrooms and omitting the carrots and basil, and the cream because there wasn't any.  And that was good as well.  You could just about taste the mushrooms among the general tomato and onion medley.  And it provided four of our daily helpings of vegetables in one go, or three at any rate.  I am not sure how many lentils constitute a portion.  So that's my secret method for quick soup, an onion, tomato and lentil base, plus whatever's left over that needs using up plus a suitable herb or spice (I wasn't convinced by the idea of mushroom and basil).  You could even put a bit of bacon or ham in it, if you had any.

Meanwhile Our Ginger has been feasting on rabbit.  Or at least, we assume he has given the size of the kidney deposited at the bottom of the stairs this morning.  No feet or ears like the old cats used to leave, just one outsize kidney and a smear of blood on the Fired Earth.  I missed the pile of entrails at lunchtime, but the SA who cleared them up reckoned that was bunny number two, going by the size of the organs.  There is still at least one adult rabbit in the back garden, or was up to the day before yesterday, as we had the wildlife camera set to check and photographed it sitting on the top lawn, but it can't live for ever.  If Our Ginger can just keep eating the babies the colony must die out eventually.  Mustn't it?  Unless they are being reinforced by extra rabbits coming in from outside the wire.