End of Summer Soup

One at a time please!!

This believe it or not is a Courgette, well in its opinion it's a Marrow.  I have lots more like this still in the Veggie Patch so my challenge to myself at the moment to use them up while I can.  The recipe books are out in force for ideas of how to use them all up in different ways, I just get a bit waylaid reading other things in them while I should be perusing the squash sections  :-)

But this one I decided on Wednesday was to become a pan of soup, with no recipe needed.

I chopped it up and added it to two thawed out packs of Veg Hash and then threw in some old carrots I found tucked at the back of the bottom drawer of the fridge ....

... seriously old carrots!!

And they were fine, once washed, peeled and topped and tailed they went into the pan.

Then I added all the odds and sods that I had harvested from the hillside during last weekends marathon tidy up session.  Four heads of sweet corn, lots of little cauliflowers, just all the little bits and pieces that by themselves would not have added much to a meal.

Once it had been simmering away for a couple of hours in the bottom oven of the Aga it was gloriously rich looking and smelled wonderful.

I left it to cool for half an hour while I walked the dogs around the paddock, bowl in hand to get the last lot of Blackberries I was allowing myself to pick.  Tradition says that you should never pick them after the last day of September as the Devil pees on them in October, so I got them just in time.  I think this was started to stop little children picking them when they are starting to go old and damp, and of course so that there are always some available for the wildlife.

This last 200 grams brings our blackberry harvest total to three kilos, a brilliant amount and looking at mysupermarket.com for a price comparison it shows that I have saved at least £30 by gathering in my own.  This latest little picking were open frozen and then added to last weeks berries in the freezer.  One and a half kilos ready to use for whatever we need them for.

After my picking session I whizzed up the soup with my stick blender and had a small bowl of  'End of Summer' soup as it was christened, with a dollop of yogurt ...

... and the rest of it, apart from one bowlful for the next day,  very appropriately went into yogurt pots and was placed in the freezer for future consumption.  So a grand total of two bowls and three kilos of 'End of Summer' soup.

This harvesting lark is keeping me very busy at the moment, but it will all be worthwhile in a few months, when we can tuck into all the goodness of Summer on a cold wintery day.

Sue xx