03.03.08: Freegan Auberginey

In just a few weeks, Olga a.k.a. Ola has established a signature soup style using ingredients she fetches for free from the wholesale market at New Covent Garden, where one can usually pick up sweet peppers and tomatoes-on-the-turn, as well as a variable selection of other stuff. Ola's style is a vegetable potage, thickened with potatoes in the base, perked up with tomatoes in the top and usually incorporating at least one other prominent ingredient.

Today, Olga and Eugene came back from the market with various items, including a few bulbs of fennel and eight or so big aubergines, individually packaged in cellophane. Mmm... Aubergine soup? I advised Olga to slice and roast the aubergines with quite a lot of oil to concentrate their flavour and I didn't stick around to watch, but I guess that's what she did. I know she put the fennel in the base of the soup with onion and leek, carrot and celery. Then, I expect, she added the aubergines that had been roasted with tomatoes and peppers and pureed the lot with Brenda the blender.

Garnished with chives, this was a thick, distinctly 'auberginey' (Eugene's word) concoction that went down very well with 21 people. However, it was also Ola's last go in the Soup Kitchen for the time being. Having beguiled us with her filling and zesty soups, Olga is going home to see her folks in Lithuania leaving not even a picture for us to remember her by. Eugene endures!

26.02.08: Baltic Freegan Soup

Food Not Bombs pacifists, Olga from Lithuania recruited Eugene from Belarus to go cotchelling down Nine Elms today. They are Baltic Freegans and their soup was well Baltic in that it was potato-based and typically Freegan in that its top note was tomato and sweet peppers (which are discarded every day at the wholesale market).

Olga, a.k.a. 'Ola' (its supposed to be a diminutive, but I don't get it) started with onions that Carlo had left over, some carrots and a leek. I saw two celeriac roots and a couple of parsnips go in the body of the soup, which was filled out by potatoes that Carlo had boiled and left in the 'fridge. I noticed that she emulated my technique of roasting the tomatoes and peppers to concentrate their flavour and passing them through a sieve to remove pips 'n' skins.

Eugene sliced courgettes, which Ola fried and added to the blended soup to give it texture and finished it with copious quantities of dill. I can't help but say it was dill-icious. I know, I know. I beg your pardon. That's the kind of thing Jen might say. Actually, she wrote in the dairy (which is the new log bok): 'Really yummy and filling - nice to have some salad, too, Friendly faces - hope you carry on'.

In other news:

* Following Carlo's frustrating experience on Monday - of which we shall never speak - he's flown to Germany to chill out with his girlfriend and so we say, arrivederci, Signor Bueno.

* Pullens Ping Pong Club's inaugural tournament was supposed to reach its climax on Friday, but not a game's been played! However, word is that the crucial first round tie, Alex vs. Alexa, is scheduled for Thursday lunch time.

19.02.08: Freegan Thick Tomato & Sweet Peppers

This morning's New Covent Garden rendezvous with Seba. & Olga was set for 8am, but it rapidly became obvious (to yours truly, at any rate) that Tuesday is not a good day down there. In fact, I was told over the weekend that Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the best days to forage in the vegetable wholesale market and that info appears to be correct. However, we did scrabble around and return to the Pullens Centre with quite a varied hoard that included celeriac and fennel as well as tomatoes and sweet peppers. So, I asked Olga - who made today's soup - which way she wanted to go and Olga, sensible woman, thought that the tomatoes had to be used immediately. So that's the way we went.

Today I awarded myself the luxury of standing on the other side of the counter, directing, while Olga and Seba. did the work. They chopped the tomatoes and peppers, put them on a baking tray with a good splash of olive oil, and roasted them on high heat for about half an hour. They chopped the mirepoix vegetables and sweated the dice in the bottom of the soup pot. They peeled and roughly diced four large potatoes - which might have been one too many - added them to the pot, covered with four litres of Marigold bouillon, brought the pot to the boil and simmered for fifteen minutes.

Once the tomatoes and peppers had collapsed in the heat of the oven and were swimming in their own juices, Olga liquidised them with a hand Brenda and forced the pulp through a sieve to remove the pips and skin. When the contents of the soup pot were cooked, she blended them with big Brenda. Then she mixed the two to make a thick, tomatoey soup that was given more variety with the addition of sautéed sliced mushrooms and served it garnished with torn basil leaves, of which we picked up masses in the market. It went down pretty well with the folks, at least 25 of them and I was able to sit about and chat for a change and take these pictures, reminding me of what's so cool about our community kitchen:

P.S.: The crucial meeting has been postponed to next week (if you care) and the answer to last week's other cliff-hanger is, yes, Carlo will return on Thursday, when he will be essaying a sweetcorn soup, and will be serving his patented lunch plates full of veggie stew, or something similar, with rice or something like that on both Thursday and Friday. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the young ladies from Cafe Cairo are cooking and Nathan, the baker of Draper House, is providing fresh bread. See you there?

29.01.08: Yellow Sunshine Soup

I set out to evoke some January sunshine with this sweetcorn (2X£1, Iceland) chowder, thickened with yellow split peas (1kg, about 75p) and potatoes (half a bag of them Roosters that were going cheap, 50p) and enlivened by yellow bell peppers (eight; £3 from Oli's) plus a 680g jar of tatli biber salcasi, sweet red pepper paste (£1.79). I was late getting going this morning, for reasons I won't go into suffice it say the neighbours have noticed my speaker is fixed, and the soup wasn't ready before 12.45pm.

I did it by soaking the kilo of yellow split peas over night and simmering them for half an hour this morning while sweating a mirepoix of onion and leek and carrot and celery. I cleaned half a dozen yellow peppers, removing their cores and seeds and cutting them into inch wide segments, and roasted them in a hot oven with a generous splash of oil. I peeled and roughly cubed the potatoes, adding them to the soup pot, stirring, turning down the heat and adding a splash of liquid to prevent sticking. Then I added half the cooked split peas to the pot with a couple of litres of Marigold bouillon and brought the pot back to simmer.

For that sweet smack of sunshine, I wanted pure flavour and none of the stuck-in-the-teeth texture of sweetcorn. Or bell peppers, FTM. So, I boiled up the frozen sweetcorn with a couple of litres of Marigold bouillon and churned it with Brenda the blender, adding the roasted yellow peppers and blending again and then forced the mixture through a sieve to obtain a broth so rich and luxurious it would have made the Jolly Green Giant impersonate Freddie Mercury: Galileo, Magnifico!

Brenda thoroughly blended my mirepoix mixed with potato and split peas into a smooth puree, to which I added the strained sweetcorn 'n' pepper liquid, the remainder of the cooked split peas and the contents of a jar of sweet red pepper paste. This last ingredient, of course, turned the yellow soup orange. Finally, I finely diced the two remaining raw yellow peppers for garnish and to give the soup a touch of crunch, which seemed to go down well with the seventeen soupees who tried it, several of whom had seconds.

23.01.08: Sweet Potato with Red Peppers & Chilli

Returning to the Soup Kitchen following their successful debut last Friday, Daisy and Rhiannon, assisted by Holly, made (according to the new log bok) 'a splendid concoction of the following: sweet potato, red peppers, carrots, chilli, coriander... and a little bit of love'. Sounds delish, no? Well, apparently, it was. I saw, apparently, because I never got to try it. Instead, I spent most of the day trying to get to Tooting: first on a Northern Line tube train that couldn't get past a broken signal; then on a 155 bus for which I had to wait nearly an hour while several buses packed to the gunnels with disgruntled tube passengers sailed by. Cheers, TFL.

Anyway, I digress. Digress while standing at a bus stop near the Oval re-reading a dogeared copy of Metro, that is. When I got back, the soup was all gone and, heinously, our talismanic frog pot that we used to collect donations was in smithereens! According to Daisy - in loco parentis - it leapt off the counter and croaked on the floor. I don't know how she can joke about it. I was very fond of that hungry frog and it served us well over sixty full days of serving soup. But all must pass. So, farewell then, amphibious Friend of Soup. May you attain in this last leap the lilly pad of Nirvana.

16.01.08: Freegan Soup

I haven't foraged for free food at the Nine Elms wholesale market, New Covent Garden, since 02.10.08, but Sebastien inspired another go this morning and equipped himself for the expedition with a bicycle pannier improvised from a plastic bin that he somehow managed to strap to his rear wheel, as seen on the left. He was ever so apologetic at arriving 15 minutes late for our rendezvous, but I was too amused by his ingenuity to care.

We scooted round the market on our bikes, looking for viable produce that had been dropped, or thrown away. Although Sebastien didn't say so, specifically, I got the impression that one advantage of the bike is that it facilitates a quick getaway in the event of being challenged by authority figures. Not that any were in evidence. By 9.30am, I expect they're all in the pub. I did see several other scroungers on bicycles, much like ourselves, often with added dreadlocks, and I guess there's going to be a lot more 'em as Babylon crumbles.

First, we found a trove of new potatoes, then some yellow peppers. Tomatoes, in various states of decrepitude, were all over the shop. The rule of picking up such things off the concrete or out of a skip is that mud can be washed off and bruises can be cut out, but if the skin is broken, it's not worth the risk of contamination. By the bins, where we were sorting through boxes of discarded plum tomatoes, we met this chap in the Royal Mail waistcoat, Jacob, who had a big bag of peeled garlic cloves, going slightly brown.

With the garlic, peppers and tomatoes, this soup was shaping up to be remarkable similar to the soup that emerged from my last foraging expedition. Only this time, instead of thickening the soup with red lentils, we found a nice butternut squash and a couple of parsnips to put with the potatoes. We also found a big bundle of very good quality flat parsley, a couple of bundles of chives and a sealed bag of oregano. Oh, and a big bag of shallots. All of which went into the soup.

Back at base, between us we cleaned and roughly chopped the tomatoes and yellow peppers, mixed with then with some of the garlic and shallots, and roasted the mixture in the oven for about half an hour over medium high heat, to concentrate the flavours. Meanwhile, we chopped and sweated a mirepoix of onion, carrot and celery with more of the garlic, adding a lot of parsley - a couple of two handed bunches - chopped with stalks and all. To this cooked mix, we added the roughly diced root veg. and squash, covered it with four litres of Marigold bouillon, brought the pot to the boil and simmered it for twenty minutes or so, until the veg were soft enough to meet Brenda the blender.

I took the roasted tomatoes and peppers out of the oven and boiled them up with another couple of litres of bouillon before liquidising the mixture and passing the resulting liquid through a sieve to remove the pips and bits of skin. Then I amalgamated the contents of the two pots, the fresh, sharp flavour of the toms and peppers meeting the creaminess of the potato and squash. Finally, I added the chopped oregano and gave the soup a last little whizz before serving it garnished with generous amount of finely chopped parsley and chives.

Today was a lot of fun and we'll definitely do this again. In fact, we're going to do it next Monday, 21st, and you're welcome to join us foraging in the bins of Covent Garden and then making soup. Call 07863 100 711 first.

Day Two: Roasted Tomato and Sweet Peppers

The day dawned grey and damp: good weather for soup. But then, miserable weather makes people reluctant to leave their cosy comfort zones. For whatever reason, too few people climbed the stairs at the Pullens Centre today. Which is a shame because today's soup was delicious. According to one comment in the log bok, it was 'soupylicious'.

What happened was I went down to Nine Elms to see what I could find there for free. Went into New Covent Garden through the gate in the corner of Sainsbury's car park and mooched about a bit, nonchalantly checking out those skips that weren't bolted shut. I passed over half a box of shitake mushrooms and bundles of asparagus, because I wasn't prepared to actually dive into those dumpsters. I walked past a discarded bag of perfectly good basil and around the corner to find a discarded box of very ripe tomatoes and some yellow bell peppers that had been spilled on the ground.

When picking discarded vegetables, the basic rule is to leave anything that's skin is broken. Mud can be washed off and bruised bits can be cut out, but if the skin's been breached, it's no good. I picked up at least a kilo of tomatoes and another kilo or more of yellow and red peppers. And I went back for the basil.

Back at base, I had a head of garlic and half a packet of red lentils - probably 150g - which I thought would work well for flavour and thickening, respectively. Louisa had volunteered to help and so while she got chopping, I nipped out to Somerfield on Walworth Road and picked up half a kilo of carrots, a few French sticks, and a tub of Flora: £3.18.

We roasted the cleaned and chopped peppers and the tomatoes to concentrate their flavours. The oven at the Pullens Centre is a cheap domestic model, only a couple of years old, but it's not much cop. I can't imagine where it's all gone, but most of the kitchen equipment that was there only a few months ago isn't. There's no saucepans, only one oven shelf and no roasting trays.

Anyway, we roasted the tomatoes and peppers with the peeled cloves of garlic for about half an hour and at the same time cooked down a mirepoix of diced carrots, celery and onion, before combining the two and covering the mixture with three litres of bouillon. Then we liquidised the soup and passed it through a sieve to take out the bits of skin and seeds. Finally, we returned the soup to the cleaned pot, added the red lentils and cooked them in the soup for another twenty minutes, until they softened. The basil leaves were torn and used to garnish each bowl as served.

Likesay, soup hungry punters were few, but appreciative. We got our first homeless person in. Rick has been living on the library steps on Walworth Road for the past six months, but is now reconsidering his options after last night's shenanigans, in which some kids set light to the bottom of his sleeping bag. Rick wrote in the log book that the soup kitchen was a 'life saver'. He said he'd be back with all his homeless mates, but that's what the workmen who came yesterday said and we didn't see any of them today.

Soup Makers: Russell & Louisa
Soup: Roasted tomato and sweet peppers with red lentils
Other ingredients: Garlic, basil
No. of bowls served: 11
Expenditure: £3.18
Donations: £5.13
Running balance: +£2.09