Plan B...

 I decided to make a soup today with it being so autumnal and settled on Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Ceci-Roasted Red Pepper Soup from her book 'Appetite For Reduction'. It is the first thing I've made from that book and hopes were high!

Smokey coming home yesterday

We often have a spicy peanut soup with red peppers in it (WHICH EVERYBODY IN THE FAMILY EATS!) so thought I had a sporting chance of getting this one past Fin, Pony and Mouse and it also seemed a good one to choose because it had 1lb of tomatoes in it and we have some from the garden...don't ask about the pumpkins...
We also wanted something quick because we adopted a new cat yesterday....well actually a recycled cat - and felt we needed to be very available to referee today as he settled in..

September 2011: teaching Smokey to knit

We volunteer at Feline Care which is lovely cat shelter run by lovely vegan Molly Farrar - we home educate so we go and do home ed sessions with Fin, Pony and Mouse in the various cats' rooms to give them company and laps and cuddles while we're working. We take our knitting too sometimes!

An educated cat..

It says on their website that the cats' rooms have under-floor heating in the winter which we are REALLY looking forward to as we live in a really cold house...!
On these visits our whole family had fallen very much in love with Smokey who through no fault of his own had ended up in a shelter, aged 18. He always really welcomed us into the room he shared with his friends and sat on books and laps and always really enjoyed our visits but we felt really sad that he couldn't seem to find a new home and only held back from taking him ourselves because we share our home with some rather fiery cat personalities and thought it might be too hard for Smokey and not a very welcome contrast to his life at the shelter which is very peaceful.
Anyway to cut a long story short we had one of those arrangements going with Smokey - like they do in films - where if neither of us was married in three months' time we'd marry each other...so we went and got him yesterday!

It was very touching as he was so thrilled to be in a house and was very soon sitting purring on the couch and after some surprisingly calm introductions to the 'tribe' he sprawled on the bed listening to the children's bedtime story and then settled down to a well-earned sleep after his big day.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes - soup! so I made the soup and thought it had quite a 'grown-up' complicated flavour, tasting of rosemary (a bit twiggy so even though the recipe suggested only pureeing half of the soup and mixing with the rest, I pureed all of it because the rosemary was too bitty otherwise) and the slightly blackened peppers I'd roasted.
So I was really pleased that both Fin and Mouse liked it although Pony started a bit of a stampede by having pasta as a Plan B so then Fin and Mouse had to have that too and ended up having double lunch: soup AND pasta with an assortment of ..'toppings' - yeastflakes, bakin bits, vegan parmesan... ugh...