An explanation

Friday 10.00pm

The last post is from the inside front cover of my book and explains my love of soup. But there is more to it than that . . .

So you want to make something to eat. You're standing there knife in hand, gazing thoughtfully at your chopping board and a pile of interesting vegetables and anything else you might have found in the fridge. What are you going to do? Well you could make something from memory, something that you've made before, but that's a bit boring. Today you want something new. You could go and look through your cookery books, find something that catches your eye and that matches your ingredients and make that. But of course you never have exactly the right things needed for that recipe that sounded so good when you read it. You will have to go shopping, but you only have a couple of hours before the children need picking up from school and anyway you want to cook right now, not shop. And if you did shop then there would be no time to eat before collecting the children, and it's not really a teatime dish for everybody, so you'll have to cook again. The lovely dish will just end up in the back of the fridge only to be discovered by archeologists years later.

Or perhaps you are a student, in your kitchen confronted by a couple of potatoes, what you think might be a carrot and some spices. You don't have any money to shop or what little you do have you want to keep to go out tonight. Yet you do want to eat, and actually thinking about it, if you could cook something interesting that would feed several people then your friends would come round to visit bringing alcohol with them, and your meagre resources would stretch even further. But you do not know the first thing about cookery. Hmmm . . . . what to do?

Well how about this for an idea? Using a set of basic principles you have learned, look at your ingredients and create something new from what you have right in front of you. Something that will be ready in an hour or less, is stress free and enjoyable to make, is healthy and good for you, and satisfies your creative urges.

It occurred to me a little while ago that this is exactly how I make soup. Exploring this further my ideas developed into a book, which is almost ready for publication - click on the link and you can download a short excerpt if you are curious. Following on from this I thought that if, using these principles, we are going to develop new recipes then why not share them. And hence this blog, a place for sharing ideas. So if you have an idea to share just leave a comment or email it to me and I'll post it.