JUST WHAT YOU NEED ON A COLD WINTER DAY...

...a bowl of home-made Broccoli and Blue Cheese Soup!   

The last thing my Mum bought for me before she died on the 19th December 2019 was this soup-maker - my sister actually went out and bought it, but it was my Mum’s present to me - knowing her, and I can’t remember for sure, it was for Christmas and my birthday!  

My birthday is on Boxing Day and it was a source of annoyance to me that Mum usually said “That’ll do for Christmas and your birthday” whenever she gave me a present, usually just before Christmas when I went to visit her.  Mr. HCB knew it annoyed me, so he has always given me two separate gifts - good man!  Even if she gave me something separate, which was very rarely, the birthday present was always wrapped in Christmas paper and although I always hated it, I think it just became a thing with her, just as it was with me - because in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really matter, but it did to me!

That particular birthday was bittersweet as my Mum had already given me my birthday card, so to read this, written by her, after she had died was rather sad.

However, back to the soup maker - it is a Morphy Richards one and I love it.  I just put in a couple of heads of broccoli, chopped fairly small, some worn out looking vegetables from the fridge, also chopped up, two litres of stock, a couple of dollops of Dijon mustard and let I do its work.  It only takes 21 minutes so then I put in the Laughing Cow blue cheese triangles - all eight of them - and they are much lower in calories than actual blue cheese - then asked Mr. HCB to be my taster.  I normally put some horseradish sauce in too, to give it a bit of a kick, so he said he thought it definitely needed some.

The job is now done and we have two large jugs of soup, which we will use for our main meal today with some chicken left over from our roast dinner yesterday - the soup definitely has a kick!

Off to meet a friend for coffee this afternoon and looking forward to that.

Have a great week but stay warm and pop in for a bowl of soup if you are anywhere near!

P.S.  I did have my Lindt Lindor chocolate last night - just one - which is a miracle in itself - but I cut it into 8 tiny pieces, enjoyed every one of them and took half an hour to eat them!  Mr. T would have been amazed as normally, I would have eaten three or four (and the rest, I hear him shout!) in that time.