Like seeing the sun shine across our damp but not flooded driveways.

Soup season is well and truly with us now.  I’ve kicked off my batch soup making with pumpkin soup.  Paying $11 for two packets of pre cut butternut was a small price to pay for the time and fingers that would have been sacrificed if I’d done the dicing myself.

I used kidspot’s slow cooker pumpkin soup recipe which is pretty budget friendly (more so if you’re an expert pumpkin dicer).  The only modification I made was to use ready made stock over the cubes suggested in the recipe.

This recipe required the vegetables to be fried gently before being placed in the slow cooker.  I did this in two batches, around 7 minutes each.

Which gave me a bit of time to catch up on this month’s AWW complete with a pattern for George’s vest.  I’m going to ask Toddler SSG’s Graunty very nicely if she wouldn’t mind using the pattern on page 195 for her next batch of vest knitting.

The Belle Gibson interview that’s hit the front page of many Australian media outlets is in this month’s issue too and I’ll be reading it with interest.  I understand Belle was not paid for her interview confessing to her ‘life-long struggle with the truth’ (best euphemism as interview title ever).  There are quite a few pictures in the feature showing Belle looking aggrieved and close to tears but I’m not sure how this will help those who believed in her story about her whole foods cure (for a cancer she never had) and possibly tried to cure themselves in a similar fashion.

From what I’ve skimmed of the interview, Belle herself doesn’t quite seem to know how her ‘diagnosis’ came to be made or why the lies kept getting more and more elaborate.  She comes across as being very troubled.  It’s a sad statement of our society’s obsession with clean living beautiful people that we so readily believe all that they say without bothering to research and substantiate their claims.

But back to the soup.

It simmered away in the slow cooker for 6 hours, got pulverised with my stick blender and then thickened with some cooking cream.  A whole 300ml tub to be precise.

And here is the best pumpkin soup I’ve ever made in my slow cooker.  The pre frying really made a difference to the intensity of the the vegetable flavours.  I prefer the taste to using roasted vegetables. It possibly didn’t need the cream for flavour but being nearly winter and all, soups need to be hearty, don’t they?

Eating lunch whilst trying to unravel the Belle Gibson scandal…

The pumpkin soup was my contribution to lunch today.  Which as you can see was all about heartiness.  Eggs with soya sauce and ketchup (it’s a Chinese thing…. don’t knock it until you’ve tried it….) and a chicken and vegetable stir fry that’s popular as a street food in Malaysia plus toast.  It was a pretty intense session at the gym this morning, what can I say?