This Week: It’s Definitely Soup Weather

This week it’s soup weather! The weather’s closed in, and it has been cold cold cold!

I’ve been knitting a hat. I’ll have pics for you in the next week or so, but I finally worked up a hat to go with my winter coat!

It’s colourwork, aka double-warm!

I’ve been crocheting snowflakes. We won’t be spending Christmas at this home – we’ll be heading home to New Zealand. That means family and food and a bigger celebration, but no chance to put up our own decorations. That will have to wait until Christmas 2018, at this rate. I’ll have a post to share soon.

I’ve been eating soup. It’s definitely heading into soup weather! This dish was so photogenic I just had to take a snap. It’s beetroot and sweet potato soup.

No recipe – I just fried off the aromatics (an onion and a knob of ginger), then dumped in bulk (beetroot, potato – sweet and regular – and carrots for colour). I added chicken stock, and hissed it in the pressure cooker for about ten minutes. Then I just whizzed it with the stick blender, and sprinkled on feta and coriander. That’s sour dough with wasabi hummus on the side. I am very pleased with how pretty it looked! Trust me, not all quick dinners I make look this good.

I’ve been watching Stranger Things. Okay, I’m late to the party, but here’s the trailer if you somehow missed it:

I have to say, it was a lot scarier before the US election results. After that… meh, a monster? Not so scary.

I’ve been loving fresh flowers. I’ve been working really hard on making home homely, and flowers are a pretty good way to achieve that. I never used to by flowers just for me, but have taken up the practise since moving into a long distance relationship. If I can’t have a fella nearby, I can at least have flowers!

I was inspired by this passage in a 1936 book, Live Alone and Like it by Marjorie Hillis. Where the book isn’t fresh and relevant, it’s wonderfully dated. I really recommend it.

Whatever you decide on, don’t do it halfheartedly. your setting, if you live alone, matters much more than if you had a husband or even a lover. And your standards of living should be about ten points higher than if lived with somebody else. The woman who treats herself like an aristocrat seems aristocratic to other people, and the woman who is sloppy at home inevitably slips sometimes in public… never let the curtains go in your bedroom, because ‘no one sees them.’ Don’t economize on flowers, or even a single flower for the living-room, even though only you will enjoy them.

Of course, I did economize – this bunch was five pounds from Tescos – but having flowers is the luxury, not how much they cost!