soup | Ramblingrose

Welcome to my blog/journal/whatever

This is the real guts of this website. The old website and its archived posts is still available at its old url. Newcomers might like to dip into it every now and then.

Welcome to you all. Amazingly I still don't seem to be running out of ideas on what to write - well occasionally - but I have my writer's block strategies to turn to - see the text on the right. Check this page for the latest posts and if something interests you just click on it. It's easy to leave a comment and I love to read them. And now you can subscribe to the blog and get emailed notifications of new posts. And sorry I just don't understand Facebook.

"We are not here for long. So let's at least make ourselves something good to eat."

Nigel Slater

"I was born hungry, not a cook."

Julia Child

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well"

Virginia Woolf

Writer's block

Every now and then I can't think of a suitable topic and so I have devised a few strategies to get around this.

Lucky dip

The first strategy I devised is to go to one of my three cook book bookshelves, close my eyes and pick a book. Close my eyes again and pick a page. It's really quite an enlightening method of getting over writer's block.

'A word from'

My second strategy is to devote a post to the thoughts of one of my favourite cooks. Hopefully it will introduce them to you

Or

I shall choose a picture I have come across and extemporise on that.

A second kind of lucky dip

I have been thinking about first recipes in cook books - so I shall choose a book not quite randomly and then look at the first recipe for inspiration.

Comments I love reading your comments. Just add a name - any name - it needn't be yours, add an email, ditto, type in your comment and hit the Comment button. Done. Wix sends me an email to tell me what you said, so I can respond if needed. Mostly I just read and enjoy. If you would like to subscribe to this blog and get notifications of new posts then click here. It's free - just a way of knowing what I wrote about today.

enjoy

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Deliciously bland?

"you need to be proper greedy to do leftovers well." Jay Rayner I know this photograph of yesterday's soup - now cold, contrived from the leftovers in my fridge, doesn't look that appetising, but David said I should write the recipe down because it was so delicious. He almost sort of went 'wow' when he took his first sip which was flattering - and honestly I'm not at all sure it was that good. Good, comforting, surprisingly tasty. But also unrepeatable, because of the way

Apr 7

Provençal garlic soup

"[one of the] most delicious meals ... eaten by the poorest people in the world." Jamie Oliver And then turned into food for the rich: "Soups made with chick-pea water or chestnut water, or even garlic and sage water, are found in country kitchens today, or are translated into glamorous clear consommés complete with saffron or rose petals in the leading hotels of the region." Robert Carrier This is my lucky dip of the moment. Garlic soup in Robert Carrier's wonderful ode

Mar 17

Nettle soup

"springtime in a bowl" I think I'm going to steam through my little collection of River Cottage handbooks, because a lot of what they present is pretty useless to us here in Australia, so it will give me a chance to see if these are some books that I should weed - yes weed - because it could be said that the whole collection is about weeds and the associated philosopy of foraging and making do. Today it's the turn of the beautiful British hedgerows as depicted here in the op

Mar 7

Celery and beans - a quest

"Celery and white beans are an Italian truth" Yotam Ottolenghi I was very taken with that quote which appeared in a recent Ottolenghi newsletter - Chickpeas, lentils and every bean in between - and I definitely thought it was a good start for a post, and yet I cannot find a single recipe from Ottolenghi that combines the two - white, green, or every other kind of bean there is. So what on earth is he talking about? And to add to that, I couldn't find a classic Italian re

Feb 24

Clear borscht - a first recipe

"the pride of old Polish cooking" Maria Lemnis I'll be up front here and say I'm not inspired by this one. I'm pretty sure I did borscht as most of us know it - a complicated meat and vegetable soup founded on beetroot - long, long, ago, but here I am with a first recipe for a clear borscht, the version of which I have in front of me, with no picture or recipe online and no comments in the book. I chose this picture of The Spruce Eats recipe from Barbara Rolek for Beet so

Jan 17

In praise of bland

“You can't smell a hug. You can't hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding.” Nigel Slater This week I have had a couple of bouts of a stomach upset. No big deal - we all have these from time to time, and this time at least there was no vomiting. But it occurred on a couple of separate days, so I took myself to the doctor just in case - who confirmed what I thought - just a mild viral infection that would go away.

Nov 22, 2025

Thickening with eggs

"Stir an egg yolk into any dish that begs for an element of thickness or creaminess. That's it." Daniel Skurnik, pastry chef/Food and Wine You may remember that I was going to have a series on how to thicken things. And I started with bread , but then the idea sort of disappeared. Well today I remembered that and decided to do eggs. It's a vast subject, so I decided to ignore some of the obvious things like custard, and everything you can make from custard like icecream an

Nov 19, 2025

A ramble beginning with oxtail soup

"Rambling talk with an image of air." William Butler Yeats This particular ramble began today, with a question, to which I haven't really found an answer. Well maybe. Although really it began a few days ago with a vague idea for a blog. It wasn't going to be a ramble down highways and byways. It was just going to be a fairly simple exploration of oxtail soup - my ultimately chosen English soup in my very occasional world soup series. The usual thing - a few words about

Oct 20, 2025