SOUP

Soups are a daily dish in our household and for them we use a pressure cooker (for economy and speed) and a handheld electric blender that has a vicious spinning blade at its tip. This gadget will turn a soup made of bits and peaces into a creamy purée soup.

Nearly all our soups start off by being a leek and potato one, or onion and potato if no leeks are available.

For this basic affair, simply cut up onion or leek or both into small pieces with potato. Cook the pieces in the open pressure cooker with oil or butter, or both, until the leeks/onion bits are transparent.

Now add water and stock cubes of your choice before pressure cooking for about 15 minutes.

When the pressure has subsided, test the result for salt content and it is ready to eat.

I sometimes add mace at the start. (my neighbour in the country, Bernard Venables, the great illustrator and author of Mister Crabtree Goes Fishing, ate this mace-favoured soup every day of his adult life). You will want to evolve this soup from there.

Quantities of ingredients will depend on the size of your pots and pans, and more importantly, experience.

Aim to start eating soup in its state of small chunks of this and that vegetable, then later, using the handheld electric blender, turn this into a creamy purée soup.

The initial mix of chopped onion made transparent in hot oil or butter (or both) and then adding the flesh of peeled pumpkin or butternut squash and carrots - all cut into bitesize pieces, will be a good start. This mix can become a tomato soup, then or later, with a good dollop of concentrated tomato purée.

When using tomato purée you may need a little bit of sugar - unless using carrots which will do the same job.

As for the ever - useful tomato purée, buy a large tin of it, then bag and freeze it in small quantities. Then it can be used soon after its frozen state by leaving the bagged lumps in water to unfreeze just enough to extract the purée in its thawing state to go straight into the initial soup mix.

Any stock cubes will do, but I use beef mostly - remembering that stock cubes are often heavy on salt.

Leftovers of dishes of all sorts can be added to your soups and spun in with the blender.

Pearl barley is a nice addition at the initial stage, as are dumplings later (just flour, minced fat like Atora, water and salt). Self-raising flour will make the dumplings lighter. Add the dumping balls giving them 20 minutes or so before the soup is wanted.