An offshoot from national novel writing month, national blog writing month is an informal competition to write a blog post every day of the month of November. As I never update this blog, I’ve decided to try this out. So every day this month, you’ll see a short post from me on whatever it is I’m cooking/eating.
Today:
Poverty Soup!
As we’re living paycheque to paycheque until employment stuff settles for the both of us (having been horribly sick doesn’t help things), we’re going on the last scraps in the kitchen until I get paid. Tracy, who’s still not well, requested some soup, so here we go!
Ingredients:
1 litre beef stock (this is just some oxo bullion and water, which I keep on hand in case I run out of decent stock)
1 really large carrot
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup alphabet pasta (fun!)
Two teaspoons rosemary
1 tablespoon something to fry the veggies in
1 bay leaf
Salt & pepper
This is about as basic as it gets, but I think my greatest skill as a cook is the ability to consistently make good food when there’s really nothing in the house. Procedure is simple – dice the onions and garlic, cube the carrots, fry them up in whatever I have left. As I’m even out of oil, I dipped into some baking lard.
Toss the lard into a pot and heat it on medium low heat. Once the lard has melted, toss in your onions, garlic, and carrots. Fry, stirring occasionally so that you don’t brown anything. Browning probably wouldn’t be bad, bit of caramel flavour, but that’s not the plan today. Once carrots are soft, pour in the beef stock (water/bouillion), add the bay leaf and the rosemary, and simmer for at least five minutes so the pasta softens. Season to taste. I left it for around twenty minutes so that the dried herbs properly flavoured the soup without turning the pasta
For those of you who don’t cook (I think only family really reads this and I know all of you cook, but bear with me), the basic idea here is that canned soup is unnecessary, and this is -cheap-. I doubt two dollars went into all the ingredients here, and five minutes of effort. Any number of flavours can be used here, Tracy is sick and so I decided not to get too adventurous. Everyone loves rosemary!
Pour in a bowl, and serve! A decent pot of soup to warm us up on a very chilly November day. No picture as our camera is dead, but you’ll see crap like this every day, so get used to it!
