Bogging Soup

Who remembers - I think I'm only speaking to my Scottish readers here (both of them) - the anti-smoking campaign 10-15 years ago of cartoon characters on another planet addicted to sucking blue sticks? They went about their daily lives sucking the sticks with blue smudges around their mouths with a voice over describing their addiction to blue stick sucking until it got to a scene of cartoon alien girls in a bar all sucking away until the voice over falls silent and one of the girls says in a broad west of Scotland accent "Wait a minute - THIS IS BOGGING!"

(I should explain for the benefit of my non-Scottish readers that "bogging" is a Scottish word meaning unpleasant or distasteful.)

Anyway, one thing Carol's been having a lot of success with in the garden this year is spinach:-

This particular type of spinach is called "perpetual spinach" meaning no matter how many leaves you rip off the plant, it keeps regenerating and grows new leaves: it must be genetically modified or something.

Anyway, it's got to the point where Carol's having to think up new spinach recipes just to use the stuff up. This despite the syndrome that, if you bring a cubic metre of spinach into the same room as a pan of boiling water, it's reduced to a teaspoonful of green gunk 10 seconds later. It's rather as I imagine a galaxy that gets too close to a black hole and gets sucked in and reduced to something the size of a Big Mac (which I always find a convenient simile for something that's really small). If there are any quantum physicists out there who doubt the ability of a black hole to swallow a medium sized universe, they should try the armful of spinach and pan of boiling water trick.

It was the same with tomatoes last year and when Carol asked what we should do with all this spinach, I replied the same as last year in the face of the tomato glut - make soup. (I gather there's no such thing as sun-dried spinach.) So soup it was: it's basically a potato and leek recipe but with the addition of spinach. And despite spinach's magical vanishing properties, a good few hectolitres of the stuff was produced - most of it being consigned to the freezer in bags:-

Oh now, just seeing that picture, do I NOT like things like "soup 'n' sauce" - it's a bit too close to 70s hairdressing salons called "Kutz 'n' Kurlz" for my taste. It sets my teeth on edge.

But I digress because today we sat down to spinach soup for lunch. A couple of mouthfuls were sampled - mmmhh, maybe a bit more salt - yes - some pepper perhaps? uh-huh - until we eventually looked at each other and said with one voice:-

THIS IS BOGGING!

Now Carol does not normally mess up soup so I think the recipes editor of Hello! mag must have been rushing off early on a Friday afternoon or something. Either that or it is just not possible to make a nice spinach soup (as it is to make a nice spinach and ham lasagne, for e.g.). But the fact is we've got about a cubic metre of "bogging spinach soup" (as it's now been christened) in the freezer downstairs and in these recessionary times there's no question of just chucking it out. C's plan is to lace future portions with that very salty Swiss bouillon stuff in an attempt to get rid of that sickly sweet spinach taste. That sounds like a plan to me.