slow food

I made black bean soup with tomato and avocado relish for lunch, since I had some black beans, and some tomatoes, and half a pot of coriander that needed using up, using a recipe from Lindsey Bareham's big red book of tomatoes.  It was quite nice, but possibly not nice enough to justify the effort, or at least not on a fine sunny day when I could have been outside in the garden.  You have to dice the onions, which is a fiddle, and later in the process you have to liquidise half the beans. The book said to push them through a sieve after pureeing them in a food-processor or mouli-legumes, but if life is too short to stuff a mushroom it is definitely too short to mess around trying to poke cooked pulses through a sieve.  And I'm a reasonably adventurous cook, but I do not possess a mouli-legumes.  Or a food-processor, so I used the blender, but you still have to wash it up afterwards.

And then you have to dice half an avocado, if you are making soup for two people, which leaves you with the other half, and skin some raw tomatoes for the relish.  And skin and chop up enough tomatoes for the soup, if you are using up home grown ones and not just opening a tin like the book tells you to.  The end result, served with a dollop of soured cream, is probably fresher tasting than a pot of ready made soup from the supermarket, but I wasn't convinced the difference was so marked it was worth taking half the morning over it.

I was going to make some pitta to eat with the soup, then wimped out when I got the recipe out and remembered how much fiddling around pitta takes, telling myself there was already a lot of soup, then back-tracked thinking that if soup was all there was for lunch, the Systems Administrator would probably like some sort of side plate of carbohydrate with it, and made chapatis instead.  They are much quicker to do than pitta, not involving any yeast or repeated kneading, and I thought they weren't a million miles from tortillas and would be fine with spicy tomato soup.  They were, except that I tried rolling them out half an hour before lunch and stacking them separated by squares of greaseproof paper, so that I could wash the pastry board and finish wiping the table before cooking them quickly at the last minute, and they stuck to the paper and ended up looking peculiarly wrinkled and horrible.  They tasted fine, though, and we agreed that griddle cooked flatbread was handy if you suddenly fancied some sort of hot bread with soup.

In the afternoon I started reducing the back of the Eleagnus hedge.  The middle section had not fallen out on to the lawn so badly, and gave me a sort of false optimism that the job was not going to be too long winded, or too brutal, but now I'm getting to the stretch by the terrace (or patio) and things are getting much trickier.  Great long branches have flopped out of the top of the hedge, and by the time I've taken those back so that the hedge skirts politely around the paving as it's supposed to, instead of half smothering it, I'm afraid it is going to look very bald indeed.  Will it recover, or will this be year I finally kill it?