Italian-Style Potato & Bean Soup

Don’t cook the spinach too long or it tastes good but looks like a sort of manky camouflage colour. Ask me how I know.

Italian-Style Potato & Bean Soup
Serves 2-3

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
40g baby new potatoes
3/4 pint vegetable stock
1 tbsp tomato purée
1 tsp dried sage
splash white wine vinegar
150g spinach, defrosted if frozen
1 can red kidney beans, drained

Sauté the onion and garlic in a little oil until softened. Drop in the potatoes, stock, purée, vinegar and sage. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 mins or until the potatoes are cooked. Add the spinach and kidney beans and warm through. Season well and serve with crusty bread.

Courgette & Cumin Soup

I’m achingly close to finishing the scarf. Four more rows of the main pattern and then 8 of ribbing. This is a good thing, as it has been becoming increasingly more obvious to me that my knitting method is completely and utterly wrong. Sure, it all comes out as knitting in the end, but I don’t think my backwards-one-hand-contorted-style that I developed age 8 and have never bothered to sort out will stand up to projects any more demanding than a scarf. And since eBay has just made me buy a set of circular needles, I may as well do them some justice by using them properly.

Apart from that, I have a cold. So soup was inevitable.

Courgette & Cumin Soup
Serves 1 sniffly female

1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 courgette, sliced
couple of potatoes, diced
1 green chilli, diced
300ml vegetable stock

Sauté onion, garlic & cumin in a little oil until soft. Shove everything else in, cover and simmer 15 mins. I had mine chunky but you could zuzz it if you so wished (and if you want to drink icky green goo, I don’t think the colour’d be quite right). I left a good number of chilli seeds in there, in the hopes of burning out the little bastard cold germs with which I am riddled. I don’t think I left enough in, so I’m hoping the the garlic will follow it up with a delayed reaction.

I’m a firm believer in the old adage ‘feed a fever, feed a cold’. It forms part of my general guidelines for life:

Ill? Sad? Angry? Confused? Drink through it!
If you can’t drink through it, eat through it.
If you can’t eat through it, sleep through it.

After that point the emergency services should probably be called. Such a serious situation should be left to the professionals.