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

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

Trent Valley: Twyford, both ways

To complete my loop along the Dove Valley  from the mouth at Newton Solney up to Dovedale at Thorpe, across to Matlock on the Limestone Way , and back south along the Derwent Valley , I needed to walk one last section along the River Trent from Derwent Mouth to Repton. Originally I planned to do it in that direction. But for various reasons I ended up doing it the other way. The walk from Repton to Ingleby was completed weeks ago, at the beginning of June, and, for the sake of completeness, I also, later, walked from Findern to Twyford, on the other bank of the river. If I had done the walk sixty years or more ago, I could have crossed the river by ford or ferry at Twyford, and that would have been my most direct route home. the Trent at Twyford Walk 1: Repton to Ingleby Starting from the centre of Repton, I made my way out of the village and crossed the fields to Milton. Wystan Arboretum Milton The Trent Rivers Trust has been busy establishing the Trent Valley Way . This sect...
Post a Comment
Read more

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