Mysterious Largesse

We got home from work the other day to find that the local council had left a Food Waste Bin on our doorstep. This was ever so slightly mysterious, since, in the thirteen years we have lived here, the council has never made the slightest attempt to uplift anything from the house, let alone food waste. Everything gets taken down to the recycling centre, by us. Still, we are reasonably grateful for a new compost bucket – it hasn’t needed the Cooncil to teach us about making good use of organic material, we’ve been making compost for years. We are generating slightly more food waste at the moment than usual, as it happens, because the Two Nice Girls who grow and deliver our weekly box of organic veg love rather more roots than we do. We have introduced the sheep to the pleasures of the giant oriental radish: there is a limit to the amount of pickle any household can absorb, and one or two huge flavourless cabbages have also gone sheepwards. I don’t know. I’ve been trying at intervals for years, but I’ve never evolved a way of making red cabbage really attractive. I also have a limited tolerance for celeriac (you can make celeri-remoulade, then you can make it again, and after that, well, you’re a bit stuck, really) and I can’t see the point of kohl-rabi. Considering how much the Two Nice Girls charge, it still seems a pretty good deal. It was down to the Two Nice Girls, incidentally, that I made one of the strangest soups of my adult life.  It was a beetroot soup, which is one of the nicer things to do with beetroot (along the lines of potage Crécy, only redder). I thought it might add a certain something if I dropped in a cinnamon stick. It did. The effect might have been less unusual if I’d subsequently remembered to take the cinnamon stick out before I liquidised the damn thing.  Cinnamon is very good for you, which is just as well, really.