Soup

This cooking business is easy. I quite understand how men go into this cooking business, especially on TV, and make money out of it. You will remember that my 'Flanders Stew' has become world famous, there again so has 'Swine Flu' I suppose, but cooking is easy-peasy and I am thinking of making a cook book with my own special recipes. I would put a recipe on one page and a meditation from the Psalms on the other, I would call it "Wok in the Spirit!" It will be a success and I am sure thinking about it brings a lump to many throats. Take my home made soup for instance, something I began when musing on my mothers potato soup. My mothers soup kept us alive when young and few mums today cook in similar fashion. My great niece insists on this when visiting her great gran and has been known to take some back home with her because her mother, and gran, are so bad at cooking! This inspired me to try my own home made soups.

Today I took some (No need to soak) Red Lentils and chucked them in a pot and added boiling hot water. To this I added some green (No need to soak) Lentils and stirred. Having raided the cupboard I discovered some 'Lentilles Vertes' (No need to soak and what are they anyway?) and flung them in for luck. The next step was to chop up some foul looking potatoes, and even fouler looking onions, and amid tears and much stink fling them into the cauldron. The recipe obviously requires something to develop the taste so I crumbled, and then when I recovered placed an imitation chicken OXO cube in for flavour. Adding a dollop of cayenne pepper to spice things up a bit I then added the most important ingredient of all, Brown Sauce! There is no doubt that this is the true secret of success. I stirred the lot, allowed it to simmer and, eventually, sat down to lunch!

It was Foul!
It tasted rather like the famous Black Broth the Spartans lived off! Now, where is my spear....?





Possibly the hottest day of the year today, so I wandered away from my strenuous mental exertions and sat in the park and watched the girls read my book. Stretched across the bench I soaked up the sunshine and soon, like a pig in the sun, I was bacon. (Get it? oh never mind) After thirty or so minutes of this I removed my shirt in the sunshine for the first time since the early eighties. On that occasion, being unused to soaking up the sun, I sat there for hours slowly turning a deep beetroot colour. Soon afterwards I discovered this was unwise! The red turned to itching, the itching turned sore, the friends and colleagues turned ugly and insisted on rubbing my chest on each and every occasion. I often volunteered to do the same to theirs but women are fussy creatures you know. Naturally I did not stay too long like this, less than forty five minutes all told, and ran for cover. However I did enjoy my short stay in the sun and while there attempted to study the book, 'Western Society & the Church in the Middle Ages.' This was difficult as it was much better to inhale the aroma of the flowering bush nearby, watch the girls swifts chase one another across the deep blue sky, and generally just indulge myself in the rare pleasure of hot sunshine. Those who were not brought up in a nation in which cloud covers the land two days out of three, often carrying rain which it delights to leave with those below, will not understand the British preoccupation with sitting starkers in the sunshine.

When I first came to this county I discovered it had the lowest rainfall in the UK, this I soon proved wrong when I became a postman! I also disproved a theory at that time that the area was as flat as Norfolk, it isn't! Indeed there were many on my rounds, one right around the corner! But I must not let you think I am one to complain must I? Anyway I am enjoying the warmth of the earth, and understanding how people wish to sit under their own olive trees and rest in peace and safety. We Spartans can cope with this, for a few days!