The New Blender's First Outing

A few days ago, while preparing vegetables for a curry (actually, while watching my friend preparing vegetables for a curry - I was not being very useful, although I did provide the vegetables), I peeled and chopped a sweet potato for soup. Then I put the pieces in a box in the fridge and forgot about them.

Today another friend came round for lunch and we dug out the sweet potato which was still perfectly edible, but threatening to become squishy and unpleasant, and made soup out of it, along with a parsnip, a leek and an onion. I also threw in some Bouillon powder and salt, and later the remainder of my blue cheese for an added kick.

It was the first time I'd used my new-to-me stick blender and it worked well. In fact I probably blended the soup more than was strictly necessary... I used the blender to stir in the cheese and salt, just because I could. It wasn't the best soup I'd ever made and it wasn't a hugely appetising colour but I was pleased with it by the end.

The really nice thing was that throughout the time we were cooking, the kitchen was full of people from the other rooms on my corridor, also cooking - and cooking real food: a vegetable stir fry, a Quorn dish, some kind of greyish curry. We chatted about cooking and they offered helpful suggestions which made it clear that they have far more food science knowledge than I. People, I live with fellow cooks! After three years in which the majority of my neighbours think that heating up a pizza counts as elaborate cooking and look askance at anyone who chops their own onions I am thrilled. Perhaps we will swap recipes and bulk-buy unusual grains and have dinner parties. Or perhaps we'll just jockey for elbow room at the one functioning hob - there are two ovens, and in theory two hobs, but the right-hand one has been broken for over a year with no sign of any attempt to fix it. On Sunday night there were no fewer than twelve people in the kitchen at once, thankfully not all attempting to cook their own meal but still. I seem to have ended up in the foodie enclave.

Ode to a Faithful Blender

Alas, alack, I think my dear blender is dead. It perished whilst valiantly attempting to blend up a large quantity of leek and potato soup for the vegan dinner party. Farewell, good friend.

You have served me well, Philips blender

The Vegan Dinner Party - A Retrospective

I was just skimming through my old posts and I realised that I had never posted about how the vegan dinner party went.

The short answer, from a culinary point of view, is: badly.

The starter was to be leek and potato soup, the leeks and potatoes having been purchased by my fellow hostess as I was embroiled in rehearsals for a concert later in the week. Due to a variety of commitments on both our parts, I didn't get hold of these vital ingredients until an hour before the guests were due to arrive. It was at the same time that we realised neither of us had bought any fruit for the trifle.

Luckily, I had some frozen red berries in the freezer. The strawberry jelly was ready and set in its bowl so I defrosted the berries and added them to the jelly layer. Then we decamped to the kitchen to start cooking.

The risotto was fairly straight-forward. The only advance planning required was soaking the porcini mushrooms, which I had done that morning, so I threw the whole lot into my rice cooker and left it to be switched on at the appropriate moment so that, in theory, the perfectly-cooked risotto would be ready as the last soup spoon hit an empty bowl.

The soup itself presented more of a difficulty. We didn't have a large enough pan to boil all the veg at once, so it was split into several smaller pans and boiled, fried and generally blitzed into softening enough. Then we poured some (again, not all would fit) into the blender. Half of the soup blended. Then the motor burnt out.