THE SOUP MAKER

Autumn. We’ve finally got our soup maker up and running. In case you were wondering, it’s a sort of hybrid of a kettle and a blender. It heats up your chopped vegetables and your stock from below and then chomps it up with whirring blades from above.

It seems that in order to make smooth soup, the soup maker has to punctuate long minutes of silence with a quick burst of terrifying activity. “Kerrggggh! Grrrrring! Unnnng!” it screams across the kitchen. We both almost jumped out of our skin.

Sammy had already had a fright. She’d seen me dollop heaped teaspoonfuls of spices in, when the recipe had specifically called for ‘level’. I still maintain that if you can’t get the whole teaspoon into the spice jar, and you don’t want to get cumin all over the worktop, half a heaped teaspoon is probably about the same as one level one and a little bit of guesswork in this regard is absolutely fine.

I’m wrong of course. But let’s not get into that. The salient points are that the soup maker made us jump, autumn is here with a lovely Sunday evening flourish, and the butternut squash soup had a definite ‘kick’ to it.

We do like autumn round these parts. Long shadows and crisp blue skies are the best, not to mention golden afternoons and chilly breezes. I love the trees - at this time of year their leaves turn almost transparent, like coloured glass as the sun shines through them. It’s wonderful to see the light cascading through like it does in cathedrals.

And then the best of it is that we rush home for spicy butternut squash soup and a cosy night in the warmth of the living room, with Mr Glenn Miller and Mr Duke Ellington for company. It’s all rather grand.

I’ll be ready for the phantom soup maker next time. It would be so weird, wouldn’t it, if the dishwasher or the microwave suddenly just went KLANK! halfway through its cycle. Though, to be honest, either of those two appliances could easily do that if I had stacked one incorrectly, or cooked an egg too long in the other. I’ve really got to start following instructions, I reckon.