Soup of the week ...

It’s been a week of illness this week. Blue off school since Wednesday, and had to miss his school trip to the British Museum which he was gutted about, and Pink is full of cold. A friend who is a GP suggested at pick up on Tuesday afternoon that the spots on her (Pink’s) face which I had vaguely put down to a surge of hormones or something might actually be an indication that she had “hand, foot and mouth”. She advised me that if she was well in herself there was nothing else to be done, but I felt a surge of guilt that perhaps I should have realised something (not quite sure what) and kept her cosseted at home. I felt slightly less guilty having read Lucy Mangan in the Saturday Guardian this week in which she writes about her (Northern, calpol is for wimps) approach as compared with her partner’s. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/20/medicine-children-health-lucy-mangan?INTCMP=SRCH . It’s very funny and very true – I know where she’s coming from. Incidentally, Tim Dowling is also hilarious this week – for any cat/dog owners out there http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/20/tim-dowling-dogs . I’m not suggesting you change your own weekend newspaper habits, but what with Hugh and Dan writing as well, this is my current paper of choice, and these 2 particular articles really rang true for me this week.

Anyway, a much improved Blue has gone to Oxford with the Husband in pursuit of a suit, so Pink and  I have hung out, mainly at the library, where I managed to pick up 3 books about quilting (my latest mini-obsession) and Pink persuaded me to let her get The Sword and the Stone DVD. I have one of my internal dilemmas every time I go with the kids to our little library. In my heart, I want them to race to the books, eagerly perusing the shelves, quickly becoming utterly absorbed, but oh no. Every time, straight for the DVDs. “Can’t we have a DVD?” “Pleeeeaaasssse” “But why not?” and then, always “But it’s not FFFAAAAIIIIRRRRRR”. It gives me mild palpitations. To be fair I don’t know what my objection really is. The kids do watch TV but I try to restrict it to a certain extent – probably because that’s how it was for me – BBC One only, and definitely not Grange Hill, but getting DVDs out of the library just feels wrong.

Still, I crumbled fairly quickly this morning, because, going back to the sick household theme, I was up at 3.30 this morning not with one of the kids but with the dog, Fred, who had an upset stomach. I have to say that I wasn’t feeling much sympathy for him at 3.30 this morning as he strained his way   around the garden (did I mention his recent penchant for eating baby rats – the less said about that the better, for all concerned, but you get the picture), and even less when I got back in and found the sick that also had to be cleared up, but he really is feeling sorry for himself today. I crawled back into bed about 4 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so you can imagine that it didn’t take much for me to give in to the pressure to have a DVD.

To be honest, as I was making the soup of the week (HFW’s Mexican tomato and bean) after we got back from our little outing, I could hear her hacking away as if she’d been smoking Marlboro Reds all night, and I decided there were worse ways she could spend an hour or so than watching the adventures of the young Arthur as told in glorious Disney technicolour. It also meant that I could get on with swearing at the bread dough – which is a story for another day – and chopping up onions and tomatoes for the soup. Hugh bills it as a summer soup – a kind of salsa in soup form – using black eyed beans and chopped tomatoes. I’m sure it would taste even better using lovely, home-grown tomatoes in the summer months, and the food ethics of using hard, polytunnel (or worse) ripened fruit from Holland haven’t escaped me, but there we go. I left out the chillies just because as I’ve said before, the kids don’t go a bundle on heat just yet, and I used a teaspoon each of ground cumin and coriander, being spices that I use when making fajitas, and which have a familiar taste for them.

Anyway, it’s lunch time now so I’m going to see if I can pack some soupy goodness into Pink at least, and feel like I’m being slightly less negligent a parent! Fred won't be getting any. He's on a starvation diet for 24 hrs. Maybe that will teach him to leave the little ratties alone.