Flatbread

So you are making soup.  What do you choose to accompany it?  I like to have some fresh bread on the table (not too much, because it triggers flashbacks to childhood when my mother would chastise me for filling up on bread.  'Eat your meat, not all that bread' she would nag.  Anyway, I digress...)

A really easy bread type recipe that goes really well with just about any soup is a flatbread.  Its not too hard to make, and is pretty light, so even my mother wouldn't mind me eating it

Leek & Potato Soup

This is a pretty simple, but hearty and tasty recipe.  I use chicken stock in this, but you could use vegetable stock, or just water.  Similarly, you could substitute the butter for vegetable oil and even miss out the cream if you are watching the calories

Stock and Awe (or ...and Roll)

Because no-one wants to waste money these days, and also because it's so damn tasty, I always try to make my own stock whenever I can.  That said, I use stock cubes more often than I use home made stock, mainly because it's more convenient, and I don't always have stock in (although I do freeze it when I can, for just such times)

I prefer to use a slow cooker for my stock, although just leaving it on a low heat for a long time works just as well.  Like anything when it comes to cooking, my approach is that it's not an exact science, and every time I make it, there are different items in my stock, depending on what's to hand.

Hot and Sour Chicken Soup

I first had Hot and Sour soup in a restaurant and was a bit wary, due to my dislike of Sweet and Sour Sauce served in Chinese Take-aways (you know, that radioactive red/orange stuff that they all serve.  Where does it come from anyway? )  But anyway, I was persuaded to try the Hot and Sour soup and needless to say, found it rather lovely.

This recipe seems to be an American version of a Szechan style soup, on account of the egg and cornflour in it, which makes it a lot thicker.  There are a number of variations, for instance Tofu makes a good chicken substitute, or you could go the other way entirely and add pig's blood to flavour it! Or at least use pork as the meat

Welcome to Soup Tuesday

When I was younger, my Mum had a little blue notebook in which she kept recipes that people gave to her, and others she cut out of magazines.  In this book were such wonders as 'Molly's Sticky Bread' and the Christmas Cake recipe that is still used to this day.  Now it's the 21st century and the idea of scrawling lists of ingredients in a battered blue book seems a little quaint and old fashioned, so when it came to keeping all my recipes in one place, I did what any right thinking cyber-citizen would do, write a blog about them.

So here are the recipes that I make, good and bad, with some fact-lets, opinions and other digressions, starting with soups because, well, today is soup Tuesday, and also because it's a Futurama quote - "When I'm with you, every day feels like double soup Tuesday"

Does that all make sense? Good, then we shall begin...