Fridge soup

 For no reason that I could think of, I wanted to cook today.  So I've made two batches of vegetable soup and a tomato and onion sauce.  Usefully, I've used up most of the vegetables in the fridge and, as I've frozen most of the soup, I can eat straight out of the freezer for a while.  Not that I couldn't have already.  Trouble is with turning out freezers is that you find things that you'd conveniently forgotten - such as the shin of beef that I took out and made into a casserole for Thursday night.  We had a friend coming to stay for the night.  So the three of us ate it on Thursday - and I've frozen five more helpings.  I also made mashed potatoes (and other vegetables, of course) and I'm still eating those.  Tonight, I made a potato cake and fried it, serving it with sugar snap peas, sprouts, the tomato sauce and two fried eggs.  

Ever since reading about someone's granny who, apparently, asked what were man get out peas, I've been unable to think of mange tout or sugar snap peas as anything else.  

I like playing with words, but it was my father who enjoyed mangling sayings or aphorisms or proverbs, or any sort of phrase.  When things turn unexpectedly crowded, with a queue of people turning up at the house, I think "close the doors, they're coming through the windows," though it's completely meaningless - which, I suppose, it what appeals.  "Fingers were made before thumbs" is true, but not the actual saying.  "In and out the windows, like Uncle Weewee did" was a family anecdote, so perhaps it doesn't count.

I was reminded of him the other day.  I was typing up a probate valuation - the helpful family member had typed out the description of the china, so I only had to add a few details and the prices - and he'd not found it easy to make out his late mother's writing and had, at one point, typed 'coronation' for 'carnation.'  Which reminded me of an election day, when Daddy had said, "with a liberal amount of labour, we'll put the coronations in the conservative".  And that's not, now I look at it, any sort of anecdote about him at all, unless you know that Mr Weavers, our gardener, was a Mrs Malaprop of his day.  And he'd talked about doing just that; potting up the carnations to save them from the oncoming frost.  Eh.  You had to be there.  Maybe I'll remember his other straight-faced funnies and they'll actually mean something to other people.