Meat Cooked with Cardamom, Cauliflower with Ginger, Stuffed Baby Aubegines

There is a market in Shepherd's Bush Market that I didn't know existed, duh. Last Saturday my dad drove me there, past the throngs of people heading into Westfield, to buy a new foam mattress for the day bed in the spare room. Very glamorous, but let me ask you how much a bushel of lemons, a head of cabbage, a bag of potatoes, three cauliflowers and a bag of baby aubergines would cost you anywhere else - £4.50? Yeah, me too.
I didn't really need so many vegetables, it was an impulse purchase, something I have been trying to curb, but which is a beast that cannot be tamed. I was going to make some pasta for dinner and went to a local store for spaghetti and came out with a kilo of bone in lamb neck and a bottle of carob syrup. It feels too pathetic to say that I haven't bought myself any clothes since before Christmas and almost didn't pay my phone bill this month because I spend all my money on food. Is there like a support group I can join? And would I want to hang out with any of those losers?
On Saturday night I made some recipes from 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi. I actually have an enormous collection of Indian cook books, and only the most rudimentary understanding of how to make Indian food because somehow I have always lived near an amazing curry house (Everest Spice in Drayton Park and Curry Garden in Arnos Grove). But interestingly enough I had all of the ingredients required in my spice cabinet. There are a few recipes in this book that call for things like mango powder or cocum, which you would have to go out of your way to buy, but overall this book is very accessible.
I made the interesting sounding Meat with cardamom out of the lamb which calls for grinding 33 green cardamoms, and them boiling in water with the meat and some other spices. Panjabi describes this as 'very delicate' but it was entirely too bland with no discernible cardamom flavour. On Monday I took some for lunch at work and ended up with this beautiful display of bone fragments.
To go with it I made cauliflower with ginger which is steamed in it's own juices and delicious, worth the price of the book. I defile all of my books now with notes on the recipe's success and there is a wonderfully hyperbolic note next to this one.
Also stuffed baby aubergines which are very cute, didn't do it for me on the night but are amazing as leftovers.
Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be on the soup diet, ooops!

Tomato Soup with Two Fennels

Good God do I hate fennel, sweet baby Jesus is that aniseed kick nasty. I was going to also say that fennel tastes like the Devil's arsehole, bit this is a cooking blog after all.
Isn't it funny, my favorite blogger described the taste of this soup 'like eating hot tinned tomatoes', and it's actually got fennel in two forms, veg and seed, but I'm still making it. As I was shopping for the two tins of tomatoes after work I got very depressed at the prospect of eating this when I got home, but it's still on the menu. In life, you see, you have to force ourselves to do things we don't want to do. Life isn't an endless parade, someone has to walk behind the elephant and pick up the poop.
OK, that's really unkind. This soup isn't that bad.
It does totally taste like hot tinned tomatoes, undercooked and thin, but I'm very forgiving of that because it reminds me exactly of the pasta sauces I used to make before I really know what I was doing. It's thick and watery at the same time, but tastes pretty fresh, very sweet and the flavour of fennel is just a background note.
I like the taste, but I know that the reason I like it is because I have a fondness for bad pasta sauce. I would never dream of giving someone a recipe for this, but I would tell people who've decided to make it to sprinkle some nice salty feta on top.

Pea and Pesto Soup, twice

The one thing I was really up against when I started this soup project was seasonality. Soup is essentially a winter food, nobody wants to eat hot soup in July, but that exactly the time when the most ubiquitous soup ingredients are in season. Tomatoes, peppers and most of all peas, are at their best in the summer and I refuse to buy them in the winter, so when I was looking through my cookbook collection to select the soups I was going to make I immediately disqualified the recipes that called for those ingredients.
Oh my God, it's so hard to stop yourself to from buying fresh tomatoes, it's not until you make a point of avoiding them that you realize that they are in all of your favorite food (I'm allowing myself canned tomatoes because logically they are usually manufactured in the summer when tomatoes are cheap and plentiful). I love that supermarkets list the country of origin to make it easy for you to feel guilty about shopping, but once you make a commitment to eat locally and seasonally it's hard to ignore them. 'You're just finding another thing to be neurotic about' says the boyfriend, and little crossly. Too late, we're engaged now so he can't escape.

So this recipe is pea and pesto soup, but it's allowed under my amazing rules because Nigella Lawson specifies using frozen peas and premade pesto 'from the fridge section of the supermarket'. You are allowed to use jarred pesto, but there is a slight undercurrent of judgement about doing so.
For a recipe that calls for all of 4 ingredients I had to make a surprising amount of trips to the shops, peas and spring onions were easy enough to find, but the 'fresh' pesto eluded me at two Sainsbury's and one Asda. Very annoying, and very surprising given how easy pesto is to make . In the end I made the soup on two consecutive nights to compare how the abhorrent jarred pesto measures up to freshly made.

Night One:
I think I used an own brand jar of pesto (has anybody noticed that I've stopped taking a photo of all of my ingredients? You'll just have to trust me that this is pea soup), but this is barely a recipe. You boil some peas and spring onions in water with a few drops of lime juice and a couple of spoons of pesto for 7 minutes, puree and eat. This leaves you with a barely juiced lime that now needs to be employed in some other way and less than half a jar of pesto that will probably sit in the fridge until it gets mouldy and I get to throw it away.
The result is fairly nice, fresh and surprisingly flavourful for a soup made on a water base, but I didn't taste the spring onion's and lime's contribution at all. And Linda Blair comes to mind, which is a mark against this soup.

Night Two:
I made the pesto recipe at the beginning of Silver Spoon, it took all of 2 minutes to grind together the basil, oil, cheese and pine nuts (no garlic in this version) which mad me wonder why Nigella would deem fresh pesto a shortcut worth taking. About half of the resultant mixture went in the soup and the result was a lighter, greener looking puree that tasted a lot of peas and not at all of pesto.
If only Nigella had suggested garnishing your soup with a big dollop of your freshly made pesto. The result is a gloriously savory soup with subtle fresh flavors of basil, cheese and olive oil, the peas lift this with their sweetness and you get a very satisfying, simple soup.
There is no comparison between using fresh and bought pesto, but if all you have in the house is frozen peas and a jar of pesto it's still possible to have a nice dinner in under 10 minutes. But lets face reality, if that was really all you had in the house, you'd go out instead.