Guardian Girl

I was excited about making this soup as it looked tasty and simple, but the result was disappointing. It would be unfair to omit ingredients and entire stages of cooking, then slag off the recipe for being rubbish, so I will confess to my mistakes and take responsibility for the outcome. I forgot to buy beans and a tin of tomatoes, and Sainsbury’s had run out of basil, so I bought a jar of pesto. In fact it had also run out of almost all vegetables. Did I miss a particularly gruelling episode of You Are What You Eat or that Living Autopsy programme or something? Dalston had been on a mass veggie-buying mission, leaving the aisles looking post-apocalyptic. At any rate there were no turnips and only a couple of leeks. Maybe everyone was cooking this soup.

I improvised with some six-month old tomato purée I found in the fridge, which I later discovered said ‘use within three weeks of opening’ on the tube, and put in extra quantities of all the veg instead of the beans. With a giant glob of pesto in the bowl it was tasty, but then a lump of plain rice turns into a taste sensation if you put pesto on it. I stirred the remainder of the jar into the pan and it barely made a mark on this soup’s extreme blandness. I’ll finish it off tonight before the lime pie comes out of the oven and I reckon I’ll put a load of mature cheddar in there to try to get some taste going on.

Pistou soup

Piss-poor soup

I’ve incorporated an old, cat-scratched paper bag and a bottle of bath oil to stand in for crusty bread and a glass of rosé.

Conclusions:

• Baldrick would deem this soup bland.