Soup Weather

I think wherever you are in the country today, it will be cold.  Very cold. With a stonkingingly cold N-E wind.  The Son of the Beast from the East.  I can do without it - I want spring back.  We had a day and a half of it this week and it was LOVELY.  I even got hot on my walk yesterday.  Now we have been having flurries of snow coming past the window in a horizontal fashion, courtesy of the fierce gusts of wind.  On such a day as this, staying indoors as much as possible sounds like a plan, and making a pot of soup for lunch a must.  I made mine last night, so I could make a gammon steak make several meals - half went into a risotto which did for two meals - and the other half into my standard Minestrone soup.

Recently though, I made a sort of Scotch Broth only using cooking bacon as the meat in it, rather than lamb (or traditionally mutton).  You could use any scraps of meat really.

I am trying to remember the proportions of ingredients I used to make it.  I know I had a 60p pack of cooking bacon, and 2/3 of that got frozen in two packs of 1/3 in each, so I will have used 1/3 pack of bacon, chopped, in the soup.  There were two carrots, peeled and chopped into rings, a medium potato, peeled and chopped, and a good size onion, peeled and sliced. I put about 2 tablespoons of rapeseed oil in a Le Creuset pan, and fried the onion and bacon, then I added about 1 1/2 pints of chicken stock, and put probably 4 oz of red lentils in to cook and added the carrots and seasoned.  In a separate pan I put about 4 oz of pearl barley in hot water, boiled for 10 mins or so and then simmered for another 50 minutes, before draining and adding to the soup.  Then I stirred well, cooked for a further 5 minutes and served.  Yummy!  Especially with a slice of buttered fresh bread.

Let's hope this cold weekend is the very end of winter and we can move forwards into spring.  We had one day where we had the front door open all day (bliss), and I managed to get some gardening done.  When we went to Wotton-under-Edge last week, alongside the motorway (just as we crossed the Severn) I noticed the first tiny flowers of Blackthorn flowers showing the smallest white margins in the buds and yesterday alongside the A40 there were green smudges on the stretches of Hawthorn along the hedgerow.  I had only just been remembering when we used to take the children up to see Manchester granny at half term and Easter, and the hedgerows would be the brightest of lime greens, and when boredom set in we would have counting competitions for Magpie houses (black and white timbered cottages), brown cows, cherry trees and when the edible distractions were running out, I would get them counting sheep (THAT kept them busy!)