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:
Labels:

Comments

John Evens said…
Nice potholder!! ;-)
26 January 2009 at 20:21
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Churnet Way: a wonderful walk

The loop from Oakamoor to Froghall and back was one of the most enjoyable walks I've done in a long time. It had a bit of everything: woods, ponds, rivers and railways; steep climbs and sweeping views; an unusual church, an ex-industrial wharf, and, as a final bonus, car parks with toilets. Of course, the sunny weather helped too. I parked in Oakamoor and set off along a quiet lane called Stoney Dale. This is the route of the Churnet Way, which deviates away from the river for a couple of miles. After a while I turned right and climbed up through the woods on a gravelly path, then dropped down to the B5417. a spring in Oakamoor   Crossing the road, I entered Hawksmoor Nature Reserve. It has some fine gateposts commemorating John Richard Beech Masefield, "a great naturalist". I found a photo of the opening of the gateway in 1933; unsurprisingly, the trees have grown a lot since then! A track took me down through the woods to East Wall Farm. Lovely view! Nice duck pond as ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trent Valley: the march of the pylons

In the 1980s, the River Trent supplied the cooling water for fifteen coal-fired power stations, each one gobbling up coal from the local mines and quenching its heat with gallons of river water. The area was known as Megawatt Valley . As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the mines closed, the coal trains stopped running, and the iconic cooling towers, one by one, fell to the ground. The high-voltage electricity lines which connected the stations to the grid are still there, however, and they dominated the walk I did today. The stately silhouettes of pylons stalked across the landscape, carrying fizzing power lines which sliced up the sky. At one point, I was within view of two of the remaining sets of cooling towers. Diving further back into history, I parked by Swarkestone Lock on the Trent & Mersey Canal, walked past St James' Church, and arrived at Swarkestone Bridge, a 14th-century causeway which still, remarkably, carries traffic today. It was famously the southernmos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Theo Alexander

The due date was fast approaching, and, having had Toby five weeks early, this pregnancy was feeling like it had dragged on far too long.  On Sunday morning, two days before D-Day, we went to church, wearily confirming to eager enquiries that yes, we were still here, no baby in tow yet.  And then, at 3:30 am on the morning of Monday 10th February, my waters broke and things began to get moving.  Fast. Yes, I know I had to apologise to you ladies who have gone through long-drawn-out labours last time , and I'm afraid I have to do it again.  The change in the midwife's attitude when we got to the hospital was almost comical; she breezed in and put the monitors on and said, "I'll just leave those for a few minutes, then".  Back she came for a proper examination, had a quick feel, and: "OK, we'll get you to the delivery room RIGHT NOW," followed by a mad dash down the corridor in a wheelchair!  Our new little boy was born at 5:16 am. You...
1 comment
Read more