Soup

PS True confession. This pic is not of soup. It is last week's dinner but I thought it was pretty...

No fancy title for this musing. Just soup.
My mother made soup every weekend except for the very hottest summer weekends.
The process started on Friday night when she put beef bones and perhaps a bacon bone in the pressure cooker along with some dried peas and barley.
The vegetables (onion, carrots, celery and ???but never potato) went in the vitamiser. Ours was an old fashioned version called a Blend or Mix, commonly called the Blendor.
The fat came off the cooled stock in the pressure cooker and in went the veg. Thus we were ready for the weekend. Anyone coming home from tennis or netball and rushing off to youth group was accommodated. Likewise Sunday when the day was full with church in the morning, Sunday School in the afternoon and church again at night. Hearty soup with some toast did the trick at tea time.
So it was the same soup every time - varied only by whether there were tomatoes to make it look a good colour and what vegetables Dad was growing.
Mum never made pumpkin soup or zucchini soup or minestrone or mulligatawny or anything else exotic. (Heaven forbid chilled avocado!) Tomato soup came out of a can and chicken noodle from a packet but 'weekend soup,' that was special. Try as I might I never got it quite right.
But on returning from a week away I was keen and ready to go - soup. Chicken and chickpea this time, then sweet potato for a friend with a toothache. Who cares about the weather. As long as there is soup.