simple pleasures (3)

Autumn is here, and the soup making has begun. I love making soup: it makes me feel very virtuous (all those vegetables!), it makes me feel like a domestic goddess (chopping can do that to a woman), and all of this is achieved by a meal that takes less than 30 minutes to prepare and cook. My stock recipes are leek and potato (secret ingredient one rasher of bacon), carrot and butternut squash (it's in the rosemary) and celery (no secrets involved), though I also cook a huge range of what my mother used to call 'bitsa' soups, involving whatever vegetables are left in the fridge. For some reason I have never really got into cooking meat soups, probably becasue when I began cooking I was going through the obligatory art school vegetarian phase. I still carry the guilt from the occasion when my mother whispered 'I've put a chicken stock cube in but she'll never know' to me as she passed over some leek and potato soup to a vegetarian friend of mine. Scarred for life, I am.

The other good thing about soup of course is that it goes well with both cheese (what doesn't?) and toast.

Despite my love of all things soupy, one of the few foods that I truly despise is a soup. The abomination which is French onion. Countless people have attempted to persuade me of the deliciousness of this stuff, but I can't bear it. It's thin, it's brown, it tastes bad and to add insult to injury it features wet bread floating upon it. In a word: bleurch.