Feeling a little better last night I went to a friend's Birthday party and sipped tonic water whilst catching up with colleagues from my previous role. It wasn't a late night but today I feel a bit worse for wear again so another day curled up on the sofa beckons whilst eating English muffins and sipping tea.
Sundays, however, are also the day of the week where I try to sort out my lunches for the work week. This time of year this mostly means cooking up a large batch of soup.
There is something supremely comforting about making soup. The smell of onions softening in butter, the gentle simmering warmth from the stove. It is unfussy, uncomplicated cooking - most of which usually involves me chucking whatever vegetables we have languishing in the fridge into a pot with some stock and whatever herbs or spices take my fancy that week and pureeing the results. For very little effort I am rewarded with nourishing bowls of comfort to see me through the week that give the slight smug satisfaction of it being something I made myself rather than from a tin. Not that there aren't weeks when I resort to tins, you understand - Heinz Cream of Tomato is pretty much the epitome of comfort food to me and not something I'd even attempt to imitate at home.
So this week I have turned to a completely neglected book from my shelf - Easy Soup: 100 Fuss Free Recipes for Everyday Cooking. I am not fully sure where this book came from, if I am honest. The scratched off sticker in the top corner suggests it may have been a charity shop acquisition, either by me or my mum. The inside cover tells me it was a Marks and Spencer publication.
The recipes inside are, as you might imagine from such a book, not revolutionary. It is divided into sections - Vegetable Garden, Fabulous Fish & Seafood, Meat Feast and Perfect Poultry. When flicking through to choose a recipe I found it best to ignore the photography which is unfortunately a little bit insipid - as if for some reason it was decided to put all of the pictures through a cool toned insta-filter.
But of course this challenge is not just about the high gloss big name cookbooks and there must be a reason it ended up on my shelf so even if it is the only time I was ever going to cook from it, cook from it I did.
I chose to cook the Tuscan Bean soup, which uses a mixture of borlotti and cannelini beans. Half of the beans are pureed with stock to form the base of the soup and then other half are cooked in this base with conchigliette before garlic, parsley and olive oil are added. I also chose to add a couple of rashers of bacon that I fried up with the garlic as I had some on hand. The only other change I made to the recipe was to add a squeeze of lemon juice at the end to brighten the whole thing up slightly and this I think made a lot of difference to depth of the finished dish.
The result was a hearty soup which I am sure will keep me going throughout the week but I must admit that the recipe as written was a little bit too simplified and this left it lacking. The garlic and parsley alone I don't think would be enough to lift the flavour and I am glad I made the additions to it.
Unfortunately, this was about the best recipe I came across in the whole book so I think it may shortly be consigned to another charity shop. I may make a similar soup again but now I've made it once it was easy enough that I don't think I'd need to refer back again.
And yes, I fake dressed a plate to get a picture. I felt that my microwave soup mug at work wouldn't be the most appetising presentation.
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