Housewifery 101

Our diet has changed since we started having fresh organic fruit and veg delivered every Friday, complete with wildlife and mud. Now it's a mad scramble to eat all the vegetables before the next lot comes and if we eat out even once a week we get behind by 1/2 a cabbage, 2 carrots and a butternut squash. For example.

Also, because you get a random assortment of whatever's in season in England, you find yourself eating hearty soups with pearl barley that you can remember from your childhood. We used to be prime examples of what Jamie describes as 'sleep shoppers', drifting around the supermarket on autopilot, choosing the same four vegetables every week.

I used to think that to make a decent soup it was best to start with a packet one. Better still, just have the packet one - never mind the vegetables. Now, since Ruth (Watson, author of The Really Helpful Cookbook) introduced me to Marigold Swiss Vegetable Bouillon (posh powdered vegetable stock) we're away laughing. Jules's Friday night soup effort involved pearl barley, carrots, parsnips, curly leaf kale, bacon and leeks. Delish.

Tonight, I'm on duty and I have planned something quite similar although there are now no parsnips and still one pesky butternut squash. Red onions, and maybe some Home Grown Tomatoes. We're right into the pearl barley, chickpeas and lentils since I got the GI Diet book on sale for 3.99.

In other equally gripping news, the tomato plants have finally died down and I have a large tray of mostly green tomatoes trying to catch some sun in the kitchen. There is a new rosemary bush waiting to get into the tub but it seems rude to oust the tomatoes before they're completely dead.

Just to finish, I will do a brief rave about Cox's Orange apples. There's something very nostalgic about them - they're all juicy but not watery. Like an apple tasted like when you were small.

On the compulsory eating list this week:
Breakfast: 1/2 pink grapefruit each daily.
Probably the soup: Large tub of assorted bean sprouts.
Also breakfast or to go to work: 5 bananas.
Things that will get eaten without even trying: Conference pears and Cox's Orange apples.

Oh, and another thing. We don't eat much meat, for the obvious reason that we are too full of vegetables!

On telly at the moment, Gordon Ramsay has an aptly-titled show called The F Word. (As in Food, but there are lots of electronic beeps masking the other f-word in the programme). Anyway he has decided to teach his children to think about where food actually comes from so they now have six turkeys that they're growing for Christmas in their London back garden. Not quite sure why a family of six needs six turkeys for Christmas but never mind...It seems to be going OK as the turkeys are not cute so the kids aren't getting too attached to them. Gordon's wife seems lovely - calm and happy and not at all perturbed when Anthony the turkey shat on her beautiful marble benchtop while Gordon was seeing if he would fit in the oven...