Vert-à-Go

I confess that I do struggle against climate dread. Any new news about the environment is very seldom good news, and it is demoralising beyond belief to walk home from the farmers’ market with a bag of locally-grown organic food, only to be blown past by someone chucking a McDonald’s wrapper out of the window of their Hummer.

But we can’t sit around and do nothing, even if somewhere out there our evil twin is itching to replace every ounce of carbon that we struggle not to emit. And the food that we choose to eat can make a real and instant difference to our ecological impact. It’s important to educate yourself about what is in the food you eat, where it comes from, how it is produced, and what impact it has on your health, the people who grow it, the animals who provide it, and the environment. As Wendell Barry puts it, “Eating is an agricultural act.” We need to pay attention to our food, not just be mindless consumers.

Here are a dozen things you can do right now to radically reduce your food footprint. Most of them will save you money and improve your health, too!

1. Eat less meat

2. Grow some food to eat this year

3. Eat seasonal, locally-produced food

4. Eat organic food, preferably locally-produced

5. Choose fair trade food products

6. Only eat fish and seafood from safe and sustainable fisheries

8. Reduce your consumption of industrially-produced/processed/fast food

7. Walk, bike, bus or carpool to the store, market, or restaurant

9. Plan your meals ahead and keep track of leftovers to avoid food waste

10. Drink tap water, not bottled water, and don’t forget the carbon/water footprint of other drinks too

11. Compost your food waste

12. Use more energy-efficient ways to cook your food

…and check out Reiko’s Bento Lab–-just because I guarantee it will make you smile!

(this post is mostly a rerun–but it still says everything that I want to say. Happy Earth Day!)

I initially described this acorn squash as a leftover, but really it wasn’t, because it had never actually gotten as far as being cooked. It had simply sat in a bowl in the counter for three weeks, staring at me accusingly while I tried to avoid looking at it. That’s what you get for buying something you don’t often buy without having a specific plan for how you’re going to use it!

The other issue with the squash is that I had only bought one of them, which really wasn’t going to go far enough to feed four people in any recipe I already knew, so there it sat. I finally realised that it wasn’t actually going to leap onto the stove itself (although I suppose it might have, if I’d left it another couple weeks). So I turned, as always, to Chef Google. This simple recipe for apple acorn squash soup from BC Tree Fruits* took care of that squash, a few apples that weren’t quite as crisp as they once had been, and part of a huge bunch of parsley that seems to have no end. It also finished off the chicken stock I had in the freezer, which prompted me to make another batch of stock that in turn used up some not-so-crisp celery and more of that never-ending parsley. The crisper drawer is now in much better shape. Only nice fresh vegetables remain and I don’t have to feel a twinge of guilt or apprehension when I open the drawer. A fridge really isn’t any different than the rest of the house–if any part of it gets ridiculously cluttered, then it can become very difficult to concentrate at the task at hand (in this case, cooking).

Food waste really has become a huge issue for me over the past few years, and I’ll soon be starting a series on how to drastically cut down on the amount of food that gets thrown in the (compost, hopefully) bin. In the past it was quite common for me to have to chuck stuff out, but now it’s a pretty rare exception. It’s not that hard to change your habits–some menu planning, inventory-keeping, thoughtful grocery shopping, and liberal use of your good friend Google will all help to get your groceries into your stomach where they belong, rather than the landfill. An estimated 5% of food is thrown out of Canadian fridges–at least–on a regular basis. In Britain, it’s about 1/3rd and in the US, estimates are as high as 40%. I can’t see why Canada’s level of waste would be much different. Cutting back on this unnecessary waste is the easiest way to reduce our consumption and ease the demand for food production, not to mention reduce the significant methane gas emissions caused by decomposing organic matter in landfills while saving you some significant money on your food bills too.

As Alex Renton wrote in the Observer a few weeks ago, there would be no need for GM crops if supermarkets and consumers weren’t so wasteful. The first and easiest place to start is with a warming winter bowl of soup like the one above!

* Those are walnuts floating on the top. They weren’t about to go bad–I just thought they would taste good, and so they did. Next time I will candy them. Yum. It could easily be made into a vegetarian soup by substituting vegetable stock.

Spotted at Safeway: Earthbound organic iceberg lettuce on sale for $1.47, as well as a 4lb box of organic Chinese mandarin oranges for $4.99 (our spotter got the last box of oranges on display at the 8th St Safeway that day–we’re not sure if they had more in the back or not). I haven’t seen organic mandarin oranges anywhere else, so will try to find out if more are available. Their sale runs until Saturday 13 December.

Today was Stop Climate Chaos Day–a day of action coinciding with the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland. Events took place across the country and across the world, spearheaded by an umbrella group of organisations ranging from the Sierra Club, Oxfam, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and Unicef. But it wasn’t all about marches and speeches. Organisers also urged supporters to hold potlucks and write letters to the editor to show solidarity and get the word out about the need for action to decrease the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. Because the personal is also political, I cooked one of our favourite vegetarian dinners in honour of the day. In September, the UN declared that people living in the west could make a big contribution toward fighting climate change by eating less meat. It has been estimated that halving the average person’s meat consumption would make a bigger difference to CO2 emissions than cutting their car use in half.

I sometimes have difficulty balancing a vegetarian meal so that I don’t feel like I need to eat a bowl of pasta as big as my head to feel full. In my opinion, the true star of the vegetarian world is the humble lentil. Lentils are not only high in protein and fibre–they are also an excellent source of iron (80% of your daily dose in just one cup), magnesium, tryptophan, and folate. When you serve them wiith rice, they become a complete source of protein. They are therefore an excellent meat-free main dish that will leave everyone satisfied.

Monastery lentils have become my go-to dish on busy weeknights and I probably make it once a week. As you might infer from the recipe’s name, it has the added bonus of being incredibly easy to prepare as well as being extremely economical, hearty, and yummy (I think you could easily feed 4 people for about a dollar apiece). You can also easily substitute dried local lentils, homemade stock, or frozen tomatoes for the canned variety, thereby reducing both the sodium content (and its food miles/climate impact) even further.

Monastery Lentils (with thanks to Sam)

• 1 - 14oz can lentils
• 1 - 14oz can diced tomatoes
• 1 can (or 1 cup) vegetable/chicken stock
• splash of cooking sherry
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 celery sticks (if large), sliced into bite-sized pieces
• 2 carrots (if large), sliced into bite-sized pieces
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• Italian seasoning (I used dried oregano, parsley, and thyme)
• 1 Tb olive oil

In a large pot, saute the onion, celery, carrots, garlic, and dried seasonings in a tablespoon (or thereabouts) of olive oil until softened. In the meantime, add the lentils, tomatoes, chicken stock, and sherry to a medium-sized pot and bring to a simmer. Add the lentil mixture to the vegetables, bring to a boil, and simmer for about half an hour. Check whether you need to add salt and pepper, then serve on boiled/steamed rice. A small sprinkling of shredded white cheddar cheese is nice on top. I also like a dill pickle on the side.

Serves 4

For more great lentil (and other pulse) recipes, including some by celebrity chefs, check out the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers web site–you can also sign up there to get onto a monthly email recipe mailing list, or buy a copy of their excellent cookbook The Amazing Legume. Saskatchewan farmers grow a lot of lentils, and it would be terrific if everyone in the province ate them at least once a week!

“We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.”

- Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” from What Are People For?

One of the main reasons I decided to grow tomatillos for the first time this spring was because of the incredible tomatillo corn chowder I tried at my sister’s house last year. I simply could not get it out of my head! It is the finest soup I have ever tasted–spicy and profoundly satisfying. It is hearty enough to enjoy on its own for supper with bread, but unusual and sophisticated enough that you could happily serve it at a winter dinner party.

I harvested about 8lbs of tomatillos from my two plants this autumn, so I decided to make a double batch of this soup and stick some away in the freezer. I have to admit that it was a bit of a production–between making a huge cauldron of stock from scratch, assembling the mountain of ingredients, and preparing and roasting the vegetables, it definitely turned into an on-and-off weekend project. But don’t let that scare you off! It is *so* worth the effort in the end.

While my hands were busy gathering and preparing the ingredients (you’d be surprised how long it takes to remove the husks from 8lbs of tomatillos), I had quite a lot of free time to think about what I was making. And it struck me that this soup is actually a pretty accurate microcosm of the modern-day food production and distribution system. The ingredients came from all over the world, via a wide variety of sources, and I found that each and every one prompted a thorny question or decision. What kind of food should I buy? Where should I buy it and how much should I pay? What about growing my own? What impact do my choices have on the environment, and my health, and even the well-being of farm workers living halfway around the world? It’s important to ask these questions and consider these issues so that we don’t simply remain passive consumers of whatever some multinational corporation decides to dish out to us. We must take responsibility for what we eat.

Let’s have a look at the ingredients in detail:

• Chicken stock: I made this myself, from a local free-range bird (using mainly local vegetables, but the organic grocery store celery was imported from California). Free-range/naturally-raised animals generally have a happier existence than their factory farm counterparts, and their environmental impact is lower. But a vegetarian meal usually has a far smaller carbon footprint than a meat-based meal and should be our first choice.

• Anaheim chilies: I got the last 3 of Grandora’s Christmas bell peppers at the farmers’ market, and that  was it for their fresh hot peppers for the year–so I had to buy another 7 conventionally-grown Mexican Anaheims from the grocery store. If I’d gotten organised to make the soup earlier in the autumn, I could have used all seasonal local ingredients instead of 70% imported.

• Tomatillos: I grew these myself in the back garden, picked them and put them into a cool room in the basement. Sadly, I didn’t deal with them fast enough and wound up losing about half of them to spoilage. I was so annoyed with myself. Expending all that energy to grow them, only to throw half on the compost pile? It was such an unnecessary waste of food–something that I’ve otherwise worked really hard to avoid over the past year. But have a look in a supermarket or restaurant’s dumpster and you’ll see that this kind of waste is part and parcel of our profligate food production and distribution system. This waste meant a lot more to me personally because I was the one who had grown it in the first place, and I’ve vowed it won’t happen again.

• Vegetable oil: I used canola oil here. But canola is a huge can of worms–83% of canola now grown on the Canadian prairies is genetically modified. Its proponents say it gives them better yields and helps them use fewer herbicides. But these GM crop varieties are also completely controlled by Monsanto, which is hyper-protective of its babies. Regardless of any benefits from a particular GM variety, I feel incredibly uneasy about the advisability of handing over such a huge amount of control over food production to a corporation: “an entity whose legally-defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others”–especially when their market dominance virtually crowds out any other non-GM variety from being grown.

• Onion: I used the last local onion I had, and one that the grocery store advertises as local, but which comes from at least 300 miles away. A supermarket’s definition of ‘local’ (or ‘organic’) is likely quite a bit different than yours.

• Garlic: I used one local bulb that I had on hand, and the remainder came from a jar of minced roasted garlic that I bought earlier this year because it said ‘Product of Canada’. I only later discovered that this likely means the garlic itself was grown in China (like most fresh bulbs in the grocery store) and then imported to Canada for bottling. Food origin labels don’t always tell the whole story about where something came from.

• Salt: I generally use Sifto salt, which comes from the mine in Unity, Saskatchewan. I must say I felt a tiny (if not entirely commendable) twinge of schadenfreude while reading The 100 Mile Diet, where BC-dwelling locavores Alisa Smith and J B MacKinnon bemoan the lack of proper flour and salt during their year-long experiment with local-only eating. We might not have peaches in Saskatchewan, but at least I’m not eating weevil-infested wheat! We should be aware of (and be grateful for) our local food specialties.

• Ground coriander: I’m working on a bag I bought at the supermarket many moons ago. Mysteriously, large quantities of bagged spices in the international food section often cost *way* less money than the tiny bottles found in the spice aisle. You can also often find superior quality rice at a specialty Asian market, or a get a much better deal on locally-produced organic flax seed at the SaskMade Marketplace. Despite their boasts, supermarkets don’t always offer the best value and it pays to shop around to get the most out of your food budget.

• Oregano: If I had made the soup earlier in the autumn, I could have got fresh local oregano at the market, but it was now finished. Usually I would use dried in this situation, but the recipe said the fresh herb was essential, so I bought organic oregano sealed in a plastic box and imported from California. The plastic packaging (which can only go in the garbage here unless you pay for curbside recycling services), as well as the amount of energy required to ship such a highly perishable food all the way here without it rotting in transit, really made me shudder (as did the fact that part of it was already dark and withering and I had to end up composting half of it).

• Jalapeno peppers: fresh from my garden. I picked them in late September or early October, and they kept for a month and a half in the fridge. I’d like to see a grocery store pepper beat the refrigerator shelf life of home-grown produce!

• Potatoes: I bought local organically-grown potatoes. Potatoes rank number 12 in a list of of fruits and vegetables that are most often treated with pesticides/fungicides during commercial production. Pesticide/fungicide residue on food is common, and many of these chemicals are extremely harmful to human health and contaminate the environment. We can and should grow food using more sustainable methods and reduce chemical use wherever possible.

• Corn: I used frozen corn from the grocery store. I generally prefer frozen corn to canned, partly because most canned food comes in tins lined with bisphenol A. If I had been more on the ball, I might have frozen my own corn kernels from cobs from the farmers’ market to use later on, but it’s quite a lot of work. Sometimes you really just want someone else to do the processing work for you.

• Cream: I generally buy all my milk from Dairyland, which is processed here in Saskatoon (Beatrice and Lucerne products likely come from their milk processing plants in Edmonton). Why ship milk from local dairies hundreds of miles away, put it in cartons, and then ship it all the way back here again? I’m sure Dairyland is bringing in milk from far away as well, but I still don’t think it hurts to support local food producers and processing facilities.

• Black pepper: I buy my peppercorns from the Orchard del Sol farm in Costa Rica, which emphasises ethical and ecologically sustainable farming methods (including fair worker wages). Many luxury crops such as coffee, cocoa, and spices give huge profits to landowners and corporations at a terrible cost to workers and the local environment. Fair trade, organic, shade-grown products are the most responsible consumer choice–buying them wherever possible creates pressure on ‘conventional’ growers to smarten up and improve their farming methods.

Round the world and home again for tomatillo soup

• 8 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• 5 Anaheim chilies (or whatever chili/pepper you have on hand)
• 1.5 lbs tomatillos
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 yellow onion (diced)
• 10 garlic cloves (minced)
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 3 Tbsp minced oregano (important that it’s fresh! This makes the soup)
• 4 jalapeno peppers (seeded and minced)
• 2 medium Yukon Gold potatoes (diced)
• 3 cups corn (fresh or frozen)
• 1 cup cream or half and half
• 1 tsp cracked black pepper
• Garnish: chopped cilantro and sliced green onion (optional)

Heat the stock and keep it warm while assembling the soup. Preheat oven to 400F.

Halve and seed chiles. Remove husks from tomatillos, rinse, and dry. In a large bowl, toss the tomatillos and chilies with a little olive oil so they are lightly coated. Place on a baking sheet and roast until the tomatillo and chili skins are slightly charred (15-20 minutes). Dice the chilies and roughly chop the tomatillos. Set aside.

In a soup pot over medium-high heat, heat the oil and sauté onion until translucent. Stir in garlic, 1 tsp salt, coriander, minced oregano and sauté until golden-ish.

Add the jalapenos, potato, and remaining salt (1 tsp) and stir to combine. Sauté for several minutes, then pour in warm stock to cover. Bring to boil, reduce heat, and simmer until the potatoes are tender.

Add the corn, chilies, and tomatillos; simmer 10 minutes. Slowly add cream and more stock to thin if necessary (don’t let it boil). Simmer and season with salt and cracked pepper to taste. Garnish with chopped cilantro and green onions just before serving.

*This soup freezes well, but reheat it slowly so cream doesn’t separate.*

Serves 8-10

What I have in the fridge:

• corn on the cob, new potatoes, broccoli, green pepper, yellow zucchini, green onion, cucumber (Saskatoon Farmers’ Market)
• cauliflower (Dutch Growers’ Farmers’ Market)
• green beans, cherry tomatoes, potatoes, turnip, carrots, lettuce, herbs, jalapenos, raspberries, a handful of ‘free range’ crab apples (various gardens)
• most of a large (6.5lbs) Pine View Farms chicken that I cut up yesterday

What I`ve made/am planning to cook this week

• barbecued garlic marinated chicken with grilled potatoes and corn on the cob (used 1/2 a breast)
• a double batch of beany broccoli soup (a pureed white bean and broccoli soup from The City Gardener’s Cookbook)
• chicken cauliflower curry (used the other 1/2 breast, and adding cherry tomatoes and crab apples)
• potato salad, green salad, Moroccan tomato salad, green bean/corn/tomato salad
• pasta–something involving fresh herbs or tomatoes
• zucchini tomato frittata
• French country chicken soup (great for freezing for winter)

I need to come up with something to use up some broccoli stems as well as the remaining half-cauliflower…possibly a vegetable pot pie or casserole, or a quick stirfry. I could always make more soup too, but it will depend on the weather.

Every time I walk past the dill in the garden I start dreaming of Taunte Maria-style summa borscht….and I must make another batch of this amazing vegetable chowder and put some away in the freezer. It is a fair amount of work, but so worth it. This past April I found a container of last year’s chowder in the freezer and when I heated it up, it tasted just as great as it had months earlier–it was such a morale boost to get a glimpse of the heady days of summer that still lay ahead.

It’s still cool, I’m still feeling sick, and I still had a couple pounds of those old carrots to use up, so I summoned my remaining strength and threw a few things into the soup pot for lunch. Ginger has long been used by the Chinese to treat colds and flu (its strong yang properties are good for sore throats, congestion, and sinus pain, apparently). Indian Ayurvedic medicine also recommends curry dishes to alleviate the same symptoms. I can’t swear to their medicinal properties, but I know that a soup made with these aromatic spices always makes me feel better!

I used Premala’s madras curry powder, which is produced here in Saskatoon–it is a nicely balanced blend of spices and not too hot for little ones to enjoy too. You can find their spices, sauces (I highly recommend the cilantro hot sauce), chutneys, and spicy peanut spread at a number of grocery stores throughout the city, and they also have a stall at the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market.

Curry carrot ginger soup

• 1Tb butter and 1Tb olive oil
• 2 small onions (about 3/4s of a cup), chopped
• 1 clove garlic (I only had one remaining clove; you could always use more), chopped
• a knob of fresh ginger (mine was a little wizened on one end but still had good moisture inside), peeled and grated
• 1Tb curry powder
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2lbs of carrots, chopped into 1-inch pieces
• 4 cups of vegetable or chicken stock (I used chicken on the advice of Jewish grandmothers everywhere)
• 2Tb fresh lemon juice
• 2Tb lemon basil (optional: I just happened to grow some this year and thought it would be a nice addition)
• 1 cup of milk (optional: if your soup is a bit thick or you like it a bit creamier, you could add some milk at the end)
• garnish: fresh chives and dill

Melt the butter with the olive oil in the pot and add the onions, garlic, ginger, and curry powder. Cook on a gentle heat until the onions are softened (about 5 minutes–don’t let them brown). Add the carrots and stock, bring to a boil, and simmer until carrots are tender (about 15-20 minutes). Add the lemon juice and lemon basil, then whiz the soup with a handblender or in a regular blender. Add salt and pepper to taste, and milk if desired. Serve with chopped chives and dill.

Serves 4

Tonight’s salad–lettuce, spinach, mesclun mix, tomato, green beans, oregano, thyme, lemon basil, chives, dill–came entirely from our garden. In terms of food miles and taste, it doesn’t really get much better than eating vegetables that were growing within a few steps of your house a half an hour before suppertime.

I just started pulling out some of the oldest lettuce this afternoon, which was getting a little brown around the edges. I’ll re-seed the pots tomorrow with a fast-sprouting variety like mesclun, and have started using the fresh patches of greens in the front garden. With luck, I shouldn’t have to buy lettuce until freeze-up!

photo: the first tomato of the year from my garden. Anyone for gazpacho?

My son enthusiastically (but somewhat prematurely) picked the first tomato off one of the Prairie Pride tomato plants I have growing in 5 gallon pails in the back garden last week (I quickly ran out of space in the ground for all of the varieties that I wanted to try this spring–Sweet Millions, Sun Gold, Green Zebra, Mr Stripey, roma, Thai Pink Egg, Toma Verde, and another tomatillo). We finished ripening it in a bowl in the kitchen and it was delicious.

This has been a very grey and rainy summer, and the tomatoes have not had nearly the amount of sun that they would have liked. In particular, the tomato plants on the side of the garden that gets fewer hours of sun are looking rather spindly. I’m hoping they will still be able to catch up a bit, but we will really need some substantial light and heat. The tomatillos, on the other hand, are about 5 feet tall and taking over the world! I have been dreaming of my sisters’ tomatillo soup ever since I spotted the plants at the nursery this spring, so they can grow 10 feet tall and sprout a million of them if they like.

This year has been an experiment in using an organic rather than chemical fertiliser–I just hope we get some more sun soon so that I can properly judge how the performance compares. I need to get out there this weekend and reinforce the staking–I’m using the tomato spirals from Lee Valley (no longer available??) this year and they’re working really well. So far I haven’t had any breakage casualties from the torrential rains we’ve been having this summer (we’ve missed the hail so far, thank goodness).

Whether or not you should prune your tomatoes seems to be a hotly debated topic–should you sacrifice quantity of fruit to achieve greater size and flavour? I do tend to pinch off the small suckers after a certain point (but the most important variable I seem to deal with every year in terms of tomato production is really whether we get enough sun or not).

Here is a video that shows you exactly how to prune your tomatoes

And another very comprehensive article on the same subject

This article by Jackie Bantle from the U of S Gardenline on summertime care of tomatoes also has some good advice on how to harvest your tomatoes:

“Harvesting tomatoes requires a gentle hand to remove the fruit without damaging the plant or unripe fruits that may be closely associated with the one you are picking. You must pick tomatoes at the right stage of maturity. Tomatoes will ripen naturally off the vine once they have reached the stage of maturity known as “hard green,” but a tomato is considered to be mature only when it has reached the “breaker stage” of development.

The breaker stage is indicated by the appearance of any pink or red colour on the fruit. At this point, all the chemical actions associated with ripening will proceed identically either on or off the plant, so the tomato that is picked at this point will be indistinguishable from one that has ripened fully on the vine. If a tomato has been picked prior to full ripeness it should be stored at normal room temperatures of about 15-20°C until ripe.”

As soon as I’ve got enough of the cherry tomatoes ripened, I’ll be making Madhur Jaffrey’s Moroccan tomato salad–I can’t wait. I’m also really hoping to get enough so that I can get my mom to teach me how to make canned salsa.

How are everyone else’s tomatoes doing?

photo: spinach soup–it’s all the rage with the preschool set (today, at any rate)

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been doing some thinning out at the community garden plot. Some of the spinach had gotten quite large and was starting to bolt, so we stripped it, stuffed it into a couple of bags, and stuck it in the fridge. Then I got busy and it sat there for a week. Or was that nearly two? Oops!

I tentatively stuck my nose in the bags yesterday and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. Greens picked from the garden will last way longer than those you buy from the store because they haven’t taken a week or longer to get to you (incidentally, your risk of getting sick from home-grown greens is also way smaller than commercially-grown greens, although you still need to take sensible precautions while growing and preparing them). You wouldn’t want to make a salad out of the leaves in my fridge at this point–the leaves were rather mature to be eaten raw, some of it was wilting a bit (ok, a few of them were wilting a lot), and there were some yellow/damaged leaves which needed to be culled. It didn’t look real pretty, but overall it was still perfectly edible–a perfect candidate for soup.

I made a very quick and easy cream of spinach soup for lunch from Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian Cooking (2 minutes of chopping, 8 minutes of stirring, 5 minutes of casual supervision/pureeing resulted in 2 meals’ worth of soup). The recipe isn’t available online so I won’t infringe copyright, but I would highly recommend any spinach soup recipe that features nutmeg. My nearly-3-year-old got up from her nap and immediately requested a second cup of it for her snack (I suspect the fact that her daddy grew it made it a big draw!).

I’m expecting another couple bags of soup-grade spinach to be lugged home today or tomorrow, so there will be plenty of opportunity for further experimentation. Chilled pea and spinach soup? Spinach and chickpea soup? It’s so satisfying making a delicious meal out of something that you might unthinkingly throw out just because it doesn’t look ‘perfect’, and the possibilities are really endless.