Skip to main content

Super Soup

On Saturday the Firestone Cares team (a couple called Greg and Sheri, who organise social events for the apartment block) put on a "Soup Off" competition, and we decided to enter. We had a flick through some recipe books and decided on carrot and orange soup, a standard cook-veg-and-blend type soup which might come to mind if you thought "home-made soup". We were told to bring a sign to identify it, too, so wrote the name in large capital letters on a sheet of A4, and took it, along with our saucepan of soup wrapped in a towel to keep warm, over to the clubhouse.

Well. Pretty much everyone else had these sophisticated slow cookers/crockpots which they'd plugged in to keep the soup hot, and these itty-bitty signs to say what the soup was. And what was in the crockpots? Huge hearty meaty dishes like stews, ranging from chowders to gumbos to straight-out chili con carne. So this is what Texans call soup! We felt Different with a capital D, with our little vegetarian soup in an ordinary battered saucepan.

Greg and Sheri had roped in three of their friends to be judges, and they did a very thorough job of tasting and discussing and ranking. Their comment on ours was "never tasted anything like it" but that appeared to be a good thing because we won 3rd prize! Our great British soup netted us $100 rent discount, which wasn't bad at all considering it cost about $5 to make and we got a free dinner of everyone else's chicken chowder and beef and vegetable casserole. The winner was a verde chicken tomatillo soup, which was pretty special - a really nice blend of flavours.

So, a fun and productive evening. And this is the winning soup itself:

Comments

John Evens said…
Nice potholder!! ;-)

Popular posts from this blog

Where am I going now? The Portway

I should probably explain why I am pottering around Nottingham and its western suburbs, rather than roaming the Derbyshire countryside. It's not just the abundance of paved paths, although that certainly helps - I recently went on a country walk across a cow field and found myself tiptoeing gingerly across boggy mud cratered with six-inch deep hoof holes. Then I was confronted by a sign which said: Private Property, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. I congratulated myself on being on a public right of way, then, a few steps on, consulted the map and realised I wasn't. The path was across a completely different field. nice scenery, though I digress. Apart from the absence of cows and angry landowners, the reason I am walking around Nottingham is that it's the start of the Portway. There is a blog called The Old Roads of Derbyshire , written by a man named Stephen Bailey, who has also published a book of the same name. I can't remember now whether I came across the book fir...

The Portway: Lenton to the Bramcote Hills

It was cold. My fingers were cold, and my phone was cold too. The OS map was totally failing to find my location, and the more I prodded it the less feeling I had in my fingers, so I gave up, shoved both my phone and my chilly hands into my pockets, and set off. After all, I knew where I was. This was Wollaton Park. And the path was very obvious. Just follow the avenue of trees... ...past the deer... ...and out through the fancy gates. Crossing a busy road brought me into a neat little housing estate with unusual round street signs. This was built when Wollaton Park was sold to Nottingham City Council in 1925. The old gatehouse, Lenton Lodge, is now estranged from the rest of the park, and stands by itself next to Derby Road. The bridge used to go over the Nottingham Canal, which has now been turned back into the River Leen. The unfortunate river got shoved out of the way whenever someone came up with a new building project. This is not its original course. My hands were warming up sli...

Portway: Bramcote Hills to Stanton-by-Dale

I parked in the free car park at Bramcote Hills Park and set off, naturally enough, in the direction of where I'd last been. Up some steps through the woods, along the edge with marvellous views northwards, and down past a school to pick up Moor Lane again. At that point I realised I was supposed to be walking this route in the opposite direction. Oops. Well, it didn't make much difference. It just meant that the Hemlock Stone would come at the end rather than the start. Also, I was doing a figure of eight, so I could switch paths in the middle. That sorted, I pressed on along the disused Nottingham Canal. This had varying amounts of water in it. There were good views back up to the double hump of the Bramcote Hills. Nottingham Canal Also Nottingham Canal Just before I got to Trowell garden centre, I crossed a bridge and walked across a green space to a partly built housing estate. The Boundary Brook had been aggressively re-wiggled. I'm sure it will look better in a year...