From the Inside...

..it looks like a lovely day with blue sky and sunshine.. but then a weather app tells you it 'feels like -7°'. No thanks, so I'm not expecting a plot visit today. Instead, here's a post that I started last week. I had tasty carrot and coriander soup for lunches - I haven't had a smooth soup in a while because my stick blender broke. Now I have got the one back from my mum - I gave it to her a couple of Christmases ago, but she didn't get on with it.

It's a Russell Hobbs blender, it's certainly a bit more aggressive than the James Martin one I've been using for years. I hope I'll get used to it. Otherwise, perhaps I'll need to return to chunky soups...which are delicious but some soups really do need blitzing. Not necessarily this one though... look how tasty that looks, mmm.

I was looking through my blog to see what soups I've made since having an allotment, I know there have been a couple of horrible ones but mostly they've been tasty and an easy way of using up extra veg:

1. Carrot and Fennel - delicious
2. Tomato - only made once, rather wasteful unless you really need to use up a lot of toms
3. Thai Pumpkin - how adventurous of me, I even used coconut milk in it
4. Parsnip and Leek - I think I need to make that again before the parsnips rot away
5. Smokey Carrot - made with oak-smoked olive oil and smoked paprika
6. Leek and Chestnut - this year I discovered what an amazing addition chestnuts are
7. Vegetables with chestnuts - carrot, parsnip, swede, chestnuts and leeks
8. Vegetable - Chunky carrot, leek and parsnip
9. Parsnip and Pea - using frozen peas
10. Curried Pumpkin - pumpkin is best if roasted first so it's more time-consuming
11. Courgette and Fennel - peak courgette season!
12. Potato and Celery - The one year we managed to actually grow celery
13. Potato and Mangetout - FAIL! It was grey and disgusting!
14. Roast Festival Squash - the squash didn't taste as good as it looked
15. Celeriac and Fennel - so delicious. This soup is why I first started growing bulb fennel
16. Swede (and Leek) - nasty! Nearly all thrown away..
17. Carrot and Parsnip - I think this may be due next week too
18. Pumpkin and Carrot - we'll be growing big pumpkins again in 2018
19. Lettuce - well, it used up a lot of lettuces as they were going to seed
20. Leek and Butterbean - nice and creamy
21. Curried vegetable - curry powder cheers up a plain recipe

I also picked a couple of small swedes and had mashed carrot and swede with my frittata dinner last weekend. Jamie picked those sprouts from a plot which has been recently vacated - a perk of being on the committee? Well, they'd only go to waste otherwise. We generally say that anything left on an empty plot is free for use by other plotholders.

We both managed to do quite a lot of digging last weekend. Plot 7 is looking pretty good but we'll probably need to resort to weed-killer for some other parts of our plots. Jamie had laid bags on black plastic on the section shown above as that's where our sprouts are going this year - well away from the mole on Plot 3 we hope! We still need to do some proper planning of what we're planting where.
Linkin Park provide the title song...