Everything soup

Do you remember communal living, student-style?  At Uni I shared a house with 5 guys and 2 girls. It was a Victorian house with 8 bedrooms that had been converted to a series of bedsits, so rather than having one big kitchen it had three miniscule ones. What this meant in practical terms was that the guys could rotate kitchens, creating apocalyptic destruction in each one before moving on to the next.  The guys were on a strict culinary schedule that ran something like Fishfingers on a floury bap / Richmond sausages with beans / chicken thighs. Peas were the only vegetable allowed.  Meanwhile the girls lived on cheap chardonnay.


Our standards of tidiness and hygiene were pretty low and I am still scarred by finding behind a chair at the end of term a mug. This mug had a floating ecosystem on the top of it, making it hard to work out what was underneath, which turned out to be stale tea (including teabag) with a rasher of bacon floating in it. Niiiiiiice.

Anyway it is with the bacon-tea-mould cuppa in mind that we cleaned out the fridge and made Everything Soup:


mushrooms - these are in fact a kind of mould and so it's a slight misnomer to call a mushroom mouldy. Nevertheless these had descended into the slime phase.  bin
radishes - interestingly these shrink when they go off, rather than go mouldy.  Small knobbly ones bin.  ok ones soup.
fennel.  brown but edible. soup
potatoes.  Never let a few sprouts sticking out the side prevent you from sticking it in the soup.
broccoli.  AOK soup.
peppercorns.  bought fresh from the Thai supermarket Thai Smile, when they go off they just dessicate into black peppercorns. soup.
Aubergines.  I would quite like to be catholic because then I could legitimately say 'sweet jesus holy mother of god'. bin.
Tarka Dhal leftover from takeaway curry. sustaining well. save.
Spinach.  back half of bag frozen solid, front half of bag looking good. save.

to make: put everything in a pot with stock, boil, blend, eat.  Garnish with whatever you fancy - in this case, back sesame seeds and some leftover coconut sambol from a takeaway curry.