Lo-Cal Easy-Peasy Pea & no-Ham Soup (Lite)

I have to confess that I have joined an on-line diet club. Now I can try to lose weight without having to meet other fat people. To be honest, the diet & exercise plan is a bit rubbish, but at least I now know that if I keep below about 2200 calories* a day, I can lose weight sensibly and safely.

In theory.

Now, I know you are probably thinking that 2 gallons of sweet, strong elderberry wine isn't going to help with the grand weight-loss plan, and I have to agree. But the wine wont be ready for at least a year, and a chap can, if he puts his mind to it, lose several pounds in that time.

The diet club website does have one enormously useful feature in that you can key-in, store, and experiment with, your own recipes and calculate (and I really can't vouch for the accuracy) the calories and fat content in your total cook-up, and therefore also per portion of your recipe. I entered the ingredients of one of my customary Friday-night curries and was quite literally mildly surprised at how many calories it contained.

Anyway, here's my new favourite autumn-friendly tea-time snack: not as easy as opening a can, but possibly better for you, Or not.

Pea and no-Ham Soup

(There's no ham in it).

This recipe yields about 3 generous mugfuls of thick & comforting soup at about 100 calories and 1.5g of fat each. You could easily double up the quantities, or even triple them**

• 200g frozen peas (garden or petty***)
• A medium/large carrot (about 100g), peeled & chopped up small
• A smallish potato (again about 100g) peeled and diced
• 1 (knorr) ham stock cube and 1 veggy stock cube.
• 1 tablespoon (15ml) tomato puree

The ingredients - arranged neatly.

1. Put the peas, chopped carrot & diced tato into a medium saucepan and add a pint of water.
2. Bring to the boil, cover, and simmer for about 20 mins, or until the carrots and tatos are very soft.
3. Dissolve the stock-cubes and the puree in the pot and allow to cool, until cool enough to...
4. Whizz the soup up in a food whizzer until smooth.
5. Return the soup to your pan, season, & return to a simmer. I like mine with plenty of salt and white pepper. Why not try kicking it into touch with a pinch of chili flakes****?

*        That's about 3 bottles of wine a day, and a small snack.

**      Why stop there? Make a batch load for the whole family for the entire week!

***    Petit in French

****  Or Don't. Up to you really. All I can do is suggest...*****

***** How about some mint?

Elderberry Wine (Part 2)

So... some 18 hours after I added my yeast, I still wasn't sure that my fermentation was up and running. Worried that I might have put my yeast in a touch too early, while the must (that's the word we (you & I) wine-makers use for the stuff that will one day be wine) was still too warm, I sprinkled in another couple of teaspoons of yeast and toddled off to work.

By the time I returned that evening, everything was fizzing away splendidly, and the plastic lid of the bucket was bulging up from the pressure of the carbon dioxide within. I stirred the must that evening & the next evening. The following evening (when the elderberries had been stewing in the water etc for 3 full days (4 might have been better, but I was getting impatient!) I decided to strain the berries etc out of the wine.

Easier said that done: the upshot of my rather greedy decision to go for a 2 gallon batch was that I found myself rather short of suitable containers. In the end I used 2 large stainless steel cooking pots (ideally metal utensils should not be used (as they can react with the acid in the must), but as yet the permissible space allotted to me for storing my wine-making gear won't allow for a surplus of food-grade plastic buckets) into which I strained (jug by jug through a (again metal) sieve) my fizzy blood-red cordial, gently pressing the sieved berries with a ladle each time to extract the excess juice.

I rinsed out the bucket and poured the strained wine back into it. At this point I added the juice of the two oranges as mentioned in my previous post, and the next evening I also added another pint of cooled boiled water into which another pound of sugar had been dissolved (about 2 pints in total). I had um'd and ah'd over this for a whole day: I don't want the finished wine to be too sweet, but I do want it to be strong. Only the end result will tell if I made the right decision. 

Watch this space...

(The reason, by the way, for the extra water is that I wanted enough must to fill 2 demijohns plus a little extra for a about a plastic litre bottle of 'spare', which I can use later to top up the demijohns as necessary).