Some Kind of Soup...

I'm not sure it's going to be very tasty soup. It doesn't look very pretty.

It contains some of these ingredients, perhaps I should have added a few more...

I'll call it 'cream of purple mangetout soup with garlic scapes' and will have it for lunch tomorrow. One of its problems is that it should have an onion in it and perhaps more garlic, but I have to consider my work colleagues!

This is the recipe:

• Mangetout (115g)
• Small potato
• Garlic Scape (Just one, I'm hoping it will be garlicy enough)
• 300ml vegetable stock
• 150ml milk
• Pepper and salt

The 'garlic scape' is the flower stem that appears on hardneck garlic. I don't know what variety of garlic I'm growing (due to the problem earlier in the year) but some stems certainly appear to have scapes. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought the plants had gone to seed but they have pretty good bulbs on so I'm going to treat the stems as scapes and consider them a delicacy like I've read about online - and our garlic definitely has curly flower stems like this picture (I don't know why I don't have a photo of our garlic!):

Garlic Scape

 Anyway, the reason I started getting 'creative' in the kitchen is because we got rained off the allotment. We hid in the greenhouse with Neal and Jane, our plot neighbours, a few times but it was too heavy and frequent to carry on weeding. We need to tidy the plots for the 'Hungerford in Bloom' judging next week. We aren't expecting to win, especially as there are so many empty places on Plot 7 at the moment. Of course, they may be full of weeds by next Sunday if the rain continues!

I've cleared a lot of the lettuce which has gone to seed - such a shame and I still haven't done my succession sowing of salad leaf!! I do have a few more lettuces which aren't quite trees yet though...

Lettuce shouldn't look like that!

There's a lot more room in the raised bed now, which is good because the florence fennel and some radish will probably appreciate the extra light and space.

I had to change the setup for the gherkins - they were going to struggle growing through the mesh so now they can climb up it instead.

Beautiful chard in the rain