Curried Sweet Potato Soup

 from River Cottage Veg Everyday by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Bloomsbury, 2011

There’s nothing like soup for a family meal. It’s the speed of knocking it up from scratch or even getting it out of the fridge. That’s the key. What else is so quick? Even pasta takes longer. The other advantage over pasta is that it doesn’t matter if the people you’re feeding all need to eat at different times. Pasta on the whole needs to be eaten immediately. Soup reheats beautifully. Two plus points already, but it doesn't stop there. Soup also gives you an unrivalled opportunity to pack in one, two, or even three of those relentless five-a-day. And it's one of those things you can knock together without a recipe and often with the stuff you happen to have lying about the house, even the slightly past their best bits.

So, over the years, my soup repertoire has grown and I am constantly searching for others to address the need. The current staples are leek and potato (of course), lentil (of course), minestrone (big effort, but big value as it's just about the only form in which Marianne will eat big chunks of veg and Livia will eat peas), sweet potato and red pepper (with a garnish of toasted chorizo or feta cheese). All these go down well with everyone, but after that the unity shatters. Marianne can't even think about eating the strings of onion in French onion soup (though she's eat the toasted gruyere-covered French bread). She loves chorizo and potato soup, but it's too meaty for Els and too spicy for Liv, and besides, there are no vegetables in it beside the potato, so it really doesn't tick all my soup boxes. I also make a fabulous smoked fish and fennel chowder, but that's definitely only for adults.

So I'm on a constant quest to discover more soups, delicious, nourishing soups that everyone will enjoy. Vegetable soups fit with the way we eat, far better than any other vegetable-based meals. This one leapt out at me from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new book: curried sweet potato. Lots of ingredients but perfectly straightforward method. Also, the red pepper and sweet potato soup I make is such a huge success with everyone, that this seemed like a natural extension. Just pushing the envelope a little bit... 

I was going to make it on Wednesday (quiet day at home with no after-school activities) to eat on Thursday (busy day out with child-ferrying after school), but looking at the method (not too much chopping required, the joy of whizzed soups) I thought I wouldn't bother. And sure enough it took about half an hour and minimal effort to put together. Oh, and it smelled heavenly! 

I though the khaki colour might spook the kids, but they didn't even mention it. Marianne took one look at said "Why did you put green bits in it. Do I have to eat the green bits?" She wasn't best pleased by my reaction, but ate it pretty happily in the end. I had worried that Livia too might have a problem with it. She's not wild about spiciness. But I'd played it safe and only put one chili in it, and the coconut milk and yogurt must have done their soothing work too, because she said it wasn't too spicy and cleaned her bowl pretty thoroughly. Elspeth, on the other hand, came up trumps. "It's the best soup EVER!" she said. "Can I have some more. How much do I have to leave for you and Dad?" Ha! Triumph! Yet more triumph later, when Robert and I had ours. "It's the essence of curry in a soup," he said, diving into his second bowlful. Rich, spicy, creamy, with a little sharp lime juice and the aromatic taste of coriander floating around the edges. By bedtime, Robert and Elspeth were fighting over who would get to have the solitary helping that was left for lunch. Better make a double quantity next time.

Here it is in one of our beautiful bowls made for us by www.wemakepots.com

Spinach and penne spoufflé

from River Cottage Veg Everyday by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Bloomsbury, 2011

Mimi was out to tea with someone of Sunday. Great opportunity to try something from my new vegetarian book, I thought. You have to try new things on kids now and then, but when you can be absolutely sure they're going to find the experience upsetting it does rather put you off. Mimi is a carnivore. Her ideal meal is Christmas dinner: turkey, white and brown, with pigs in blankets on the side, and nothing else, no gravy, no veg, possibly a roast potato, but she can take them or leave them. There are a few non-meat things she likes, mainly involving pasta, but the vegetable contents really needs to be pureed unless it's peas. She's just about grasped now that if she picks out bits of onion and lays them in lines around the edge of her plate I'm going to have a fit, and on the whole we meet half-way. I don't give her too many vegetables to cope with and she eats what I put on her plate (although broccoli requires industrial quantities of ketchup).

I got Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new vegetarian book for Christmas. No surprise: I did ask for it. I've caught the TV programme that went with it a couple of times and been much taken by HFW's attitude to vegetarian cooking. For years now, he's been hard-selling the wonders of all sorts of meat and fish, and here he is taking a totally different tack. His theory, it seems, is that we need to eat less and better meat and fish for environmental and animal welfare reasons, and should embrace the possibilities of vegetarian food instead. That sounds rather self-evident, but he does put it in an interesting and fairly convincing way in the introduction to the book. And the food he's been cooking on the programme looks so good. I'd love to embrace a bit of vegetarianism. I'm sick of vegetables being the thing on the side of the plate that children complain about. If only I could present the girls with delicious vegetable-based meals so they could get their five-a-day without me having to disguise the veg or cajole reluctant eaters. Food can become so very dull when you are catering for kids. Endless rounds of spag bol, macaroni cheese, sausages and mash, pizza... For years, Robert and I have eaten separately from the kids, to begin with because the timing didn't work, but gradually, insidiously, because children are so unambitious with their food habits.

The trouble, though, with a lot of vegetarian food, is that it takes an awful lot of work to make a main dish out of vegetables. Take this spinach and penne spoufflé. I chose it because I thought it was an interesting idea, somewhere between soufflé and macaroni cheese. Putting pasta in a soufflé would make it more substantial, souffléing a macaroni cheese would make it more interesting, less like nursery food. However, by the time it was made, we had used four saucepans (one to infuse the milk with onion etc, one for spinach, one for pasta, one to make the sauce), a sieve, a colander, a cheese grater, a measuring jug, a mixing bowl, a whisk, a baking dish and several wooden spoons. Oh, and another couple of saucepans (had to wash some up) for some extra veg to go with it. Not that any of the cooking was very hard, and I have to admit to having assistance (Robert has so much more patience with béchamel than I do), but still, what a lot of faff.

How was it received? Pretty well, actually. Every scrap was eaten, and we enjoyed it. It was beautiful, brownish on top and flecked with dark green. The cheesy sauce has removed any of the bitter iron taste of the spinach, leaving it with a satisfying sort of almost meaty-ness, like you get with a tomato sauce that's been cooking for a good long time. It could perhaps have stood a little more cheese, but not too much more. Els and Robert thought more pasta would have been good, but I think that might have ruined the texture.

Good thing we had it when Mimi was away though. When she came home, I heard Livia telling her about it.
"It looked really spinachy," Liv said. "But it didn't taste really spinachy."
"I would have picked the spinach out," said Mimi.
"You couldn't have, it was all sort of mushed in."
"Oh well, then I just wouldn't have eaten it," Mimi said, clearly much satisfied that she was full of sausages or macaroni or lasagne or whatever child-friendly fare she's been given at her friend's house.

Tattie scones

1st January 2012
Tattie scones
from Broths to Bannocks by Catherine Brown, Waverley Books, 2010


New Year's Eve and Robert tells me that the one thing he's missed over the Christmas holidays is a proper fry up. "You know," he says, "When you've been doing something really physical, so you've earned it." He must be planning to go cycling in the morning. "What?" I hear you gasp. "The morning of January the first?" Yes indeed. You and I might plan a long lie the morning after but to a cyclist it's just another glorious opportunity to put some miles in those legs... Anyway, I pop into the small Tesco's at about 3, thinking it'll be quiet. Good thing I didn't go to the big one, as the small one is mobbed, and everyone seems to be preparing for a siege. I manage to grab the last pack of black pudding overlooked at the back of the shelf, debate whether to go home with another tin of Quality Street now they're even more reduced (no) and fail to find tattie scones, without which no Scottish breakfast is complete.

Later, we're sitting at the table, Robert and me and the girls, working our way through our leisurely dinner punctuated by games in a bid to keep all of us awake until the bells. They're all discussing New Year's resolutions (no thumb-sucking, be nicer to each other, same old things). On the whole, I prefer my resolutions to be secret if I make them at all, because if it's a self-improvement type of resolution having someone nag you about it turns it into a someone-else-trying-to-improve-you-resolution, and if it's a wishful-thinking type resolution then it probably shouldn't be aired in public anyway. But sometimes I like to set myself a challenge (as those who've read my other blog will know). Several years ago, fed up with what I'd been cooking, I challenged myself to try a recipe I'd never cooked before once a week for a year. So sitting there at the table, eating something I'd just cooked from one of my new Christmas cookery books (Saucy Monkey from Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard), I decide to try it again. The last time I wrote about the recipes in a notebook, but this time I shall blog for your edification and delight...

We manage to make it to midnight and then go for a potter about outside for a while. No chance of a bonfire like last year, because it's drizzling, but it's nice out in the fresh air and you can sort of see the fireworks in town if you stand on tiptoes and look at the right gap in the trees. It's only about one when we all go to bed, so of course Robert's up and away out on his bike by about ten in the morning. I stay in bed reading before removing myself to the sofa for more reading. The girls get up when they like and eat the remains of the saucy monkey for breakfast (pudding for breakfast is traditional at Christmas; trifle is best, but there's never any left). Everyone lies around (except Elspeth who is revising again) until Robert turns up again. The sun's shining for the first time since I don't know when so once he's showered, all of us but Els take the dog down to the river.

It's three by the time we get back, so there's some discussion about what to call the meal we're about to eat. 'Tunch' is the verdict. So, out come the black pudding (only R and I will eat this), bacon, sausages, scrambled egg, fried tomatoes, baked beans and I make tattie scones.


 It's incredibly easy, a little bit of buttery mashed potato, mixed with enough flour to make a dough, rolled out and then cooked in my gran's cast iron frying pan. The dough's a bit soft and hard to handle, so next time, I think I'll need to add a little more flour, or maybe stick the dough in the fridge for a bit before I roll it. For a couple of them I put too much oil in the pan and they're too greasy. Gran's pan hardly needs any greasing. It's non-stick with age. I love this pan: it's smooth and black on the inside and knobbly and black on the outside, with a handle that seems far too long for the size of the pan.

The best of the tattie scones are dry and crisp on the outside and soft and potatoey in the centre, rather like a very thin crispy piece of fried mashed potato (which, I suppose, is more or less what they are). I wonder, though, if this is the best recipe? The tattie scones you buy tend to be closer to scone than to potato, although I did serve these straight from the pan and perhaps it's different if you cool them first. Everyone loved them though: I could have made twice as many.