A nice variation on courgette soup

With varying degrees of buy-in from its highly carniverous membership, we have instituted a family meat-free day once a week. The logic for this move, at least as proposed by me, is a kind of equivalent of carbon offsetting - in this case an offset for the increase in meat-eating in developing countries.

(This increase is, among other effects, having the slightly comical consequence of making potash sexy.  At least, it would be comical if the hostile bids for various till now dull-as-ditchwater potash miners don't turn out to be the first skirmishes in a pretty serious resource war over agricultural inputs, as the Observer suggested last week.)

The first menu I served up under the new regime consisted of a couple of dishes from the River Cafe Green book of veg recipes - a mushroom frittata and then puy lentils with Swiss chard and Italian herbs. Pace Lady  Rogers and the late great Ms Gray, neither was all that great, if you ask me (and the assembled clientele seemed to concur).  The frittata had lemon juice in it - not a nice omelette ingredient in my experience, which you'll hear about in a moment - while the puy lentils could have done with that lemon in their dish instead. But the Swiss chard, which has done brilliantly in the garden this year, was very nice.

(My citrus-in-omelettes prejudice arises from the single most disgusting dish I have ever cooked.  This was a grapefruit omelette (made with tinned grapefruit). I was a student at the time, and had ended up in strange house after a very long night, but I still have no idea why I ever thought it would be interesting to find out what a grapefruit omelette tasted like.

At least I had a reason for the second most disgusting thing I have ever cooked, which was a sprout loaf.  This was in a cottage somewhere in the New Forest, and followed what was probably a similarly long night; but there was a glut of sprouts and nothing else at all, so improvisation was called for.)

But here - by way of another offset for those horrible things - is a nice vegetarian recipe I've done a couple of times when we've had visitors in the past few weeks.  It's a variation of courgette soup - handy for those gluts at this time of year, and what's more it uses sorrel.

It's a problem, sorrel.  Hardly a life-threatening one I grant you, but when I first planted it a couple of years back, I had no idea how vigorous and persistent it would be.  So now I have loads of it, and the problem is that a little of its bitter pungency - delightful as it is - goes a very long way.

Anyway, here's my Courgette Soup with Perfumed Rice and Sorrel Two Ways.  The rice is the thickening agent (which in most recipes is provided by potatoes, but I think this gives a lovely perfumed addition).  Should serve eight handsomely. All quantities approximate only:
Ingredients:

• 1 large white onion 
• 2 or 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 oz unsalted butter
• About 2-3 lbs courgettes - I used round yellow ones, which give a nice colour
• About 2 pints of chicken stock
•  A few springs of parsley
• 5 level tablespoons of a perfumed rice like Basmati or Jasmine
• Milk
• Single or whipping cream
• Sea salt and black pepper
• About 20 nice young sorrel leaves, any thick stalks removed

Method:

• Peel and chop the onion roughly
• Cut open the courgettes and remove the seeds and soft stuff around them, so you are just left with the flesh and skin
• Sweat the onion and garlic very gently in the butter for about 10 minutes
• Add the courgettes and continue to cook until their liquid starts to run freely - about another 10 minutes
• Season well with salt and pepper
• Add the chicken stock and parsley and cook another few minutes
• Add the rice and stir well to separate, then cook a further 10 minutes or so till the rice is completely cooked and fluffy
• Cool and then liquidise thoroughly, so that the soup is very smooth.  Add some milk before this if you want, or after, in order to give the soup the consistency you like.  I make mine fairly (but not too) thick (how's that for an accurate benchmark!)
• Add about half a pint of cream - again, to taste - and stir it in well
• Adjust the seasoning 

 Meantime:

• Cook half the sorrel leaves in a little butter so that they collapse like spinach.  Then add a bit of cream and stir to make a thick paste.  Keep warm
• Slice the rest of the (uncooked) sorrel leaves crosswise into thin strips (say 1cm)

Finally:

• Reheat the soup slowly so as not to burn the bottom
• Put a small handful of fresh sorrel leaves in the bottom of each soup bowl
• Ladle the soup on top
• Put a small dollop of sorrel paste into the middle
• Swirl some cream around this
• Scatter with chives if you like

The sorrel adds two variations of lovely bite against the sweet perfume of the rice.

Plum Tom Progress

Back in early May, when I planted my tomatoes outdoors, I wrote a distinctly pessimistic note about their prospects; suggesting that, as the prima donnas of the vegetable world, and whatever their early promise, they would inevitably prove a disheartening disappointment.

Well, inevitably, this year they are really going to town on me in prolonging the agony of awaiting their demise.  Not a single plant has died, so my usual rabid over-planting has resulted not in an ever-thinning collection of wilting individuals  but in a thick hedge bursting with sturdy health

 

while every truss of flowers has set and the branches are groaning with beautiful green plum tomatoes

It's not too late for their Italian treachery though!  Just when the weather needs to stay dry and warm it threatens to turn cold and wet; while the dense hedge they've made of themselves by not dying off in their usual hypochondriac fashion means that the slightest rot or blight is going to spread like viral wildfire.

We shall see ... I still back the Eeyore view

Catching Up (2): The Death of Death in the Afternoon?

The other story that interested me on my travels was the decision by the Catalan parliament to ban bullfighting (the link has some dramatic pictures, which the BBC is required to warn you that you might find "disturbing").

The arguments over this are well known, and if you take the view that bullfighting is a "sport", then it is manifestly clear that it's a cruel one.

All I can say is that no one who hasn't been to a bullfight can really have a valid view.  It is a spectacle, and an experience, completely unlike any other.  I leave aside the opportunity it provides to witness physical courage, though the courage of a matador facing a fully grown and properly bred and presented bull - a truly terrifying wild animal - is very real.  (You will probably recognise just how real only if you attend a novada,  where trainee matadors learn their trade against young bulls, and where you will often see the (generally)  hilarious but sometimes painful (and occasionally even fatal) results of a lack of courage in front of a bull.)

But what makes bullfighting truly unique is that it offers an opportunity to open yourself to the reality of death; a reality that every other strand of our culture persuades us to deny and shy away from.  It was this aspect of bullfighting that led Hemingway to entitle his famous book on the subject Death in the Afternoon and to argue against the view that it is any kind of "sport", but rather a drama - and a tragedy in the sense that it can have only one outcome for the bull - that connects us (literally) viscerally to the finality of all earthly existence. 

I don't know whether the opportunity to have that connection is worth the life of an animal: though it can be argued that the free-range life and fighting death of a fighting bull is no worse - and may even be better, in the round - than the life and death of an intensively reared farm animal.  But I do know that our drift into the shallows of cultural entropy would be accelerated by a wider ban by Spain as a whole. So let's hope that, as it appears, this is just Catalan politics with a hypocritical overlay of animal rights-ism ...

Catching up (1): The Joy of Bikes

A fortnight of low-connectivity travel in Africa and Europe and a week's holiday in similarly unwired Suffolk have kept me from the blog, but a couple of stories along the way interested me.

The first, which I read coincidentally on the plane (sorry...) to one of Europe's bike-heavens (Amsterdam), was by Andrew Gilligan.  On the eve of the launch of London's new cycle-hire scheme, he celebrated the two-wheeled wonder in the Daily Telegraph as the "perfect machine for our times - cheap, cheerful and carbon-free". 

As a Board member of the London Cycling Campaign from 2001 to 2009, and its Chair for the last three of those years, it's one of my prouder achievements to have had something to do with the huge increase in cycling in the capital in recent years.  Indeed, the Evening Standard even named me as one of London's top-5 environment "influencers" in 2007.  (Conversely, in my working life in the developing world, it's really sad to see capital cities around the globe making the same mistakes in prostituting themselves to the car as London is now having to reverse at such cost; but that's another story, and we will probably continue to wait in vain for an example-setting dictator who eschews motorcades in favour of cycle-cades as his preferred means of getting around town.)

At the end of my time as Chair of the LCC, I was arguing that its role had changed, from a campaign to persuade people of the various merits of cycling - which no one now disputes - to a campaign to ensure that vast amounts of money are not squandered on facilities dreamt up by people who don't have a clue about cycling and the needs and preferences of cyclists.  Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what's happening - as another piece by Gilligan evidences, a lot (indeed he argues most) of the infrastructure that's being installed for cyclists is crap.

The other thing the LCC has been trying to do in recent years is celebrate cycling as part of a way of life, and not as an aggressive urban sport for Lycra-clad, red-light jumping jocks. On that front, the really good news about the Boris hire scheme (apart from all the good leg-over jokes it afforded an opportunity for) is that they haven't succumbed to what I am sure was probably a pretty fierce lobby by "health and safety" types to force people riding the bikes to wear helmets. 

This is not just because there is evidence that, in an urban setting, helmets can actually create greater dangers for cyclists (because motorists view them as "protected" in some way and so behave more dangerously towards them).  More importantly, not wearing a helmet is both part of the relaxed-lifestyle-statement and a celebration of the real joy of cycling in a city, which is the sense of liberation that it brings from all the technical, personal and bureaucratic frustrations of urban life.