Kale, Kale, Everywhere!

We're still waiting for the tomatoes to ripen and then all our gardener friends and The Southerner are going to provide me with a enough to make a gazpacho. Until then, I assumed I was on my own, but then our friend, Rick, offered us lots of kale from his garden. I was going to cook it up and then freeze it for later since we can't eat it all and then I thought, why not soup? So I dug around on the internet and found a recipe that looked pretty good, but one that I could alter some too. So tomorrow the soup should be a lovely pale green and very, very healthy! We better thaw out the pie Roger brought last week. We don't want to get a bad reputation for serving health food at Sunday Soup!

If I had a loonie for every person who told me yesterday, "I don't really like kale, but this soup is fantastic," I'd have...well, about two or three loonies (for the Americans reading this, loonies are Canadian dollar coins). The soup really was a big hit, and the cheese and onion bread disappeared fast. Luckily, Antony Holland (yes, THE Antony Holland, the famous Canadian actor who lives here but locally is almost more renowned for his baking) brought four lovely loaves of bread which everyone also enjoyed.

We had some...interesting...music, and below is a picture, taken by The Southerner, of the nutter Ken who made this crazy instrument. And yes, that is a garbage can!


At first he just played it like a regular bass, with his fingers, but here, he is using The Southerner's fiddle bow to...er...play some jazz. If that's not wacky enough for you, The Southerner has decided they should start a jug band. I'm not sure who's going to play the jug, but I know they're looking for a washboard player who can keep time. If you're interested in chasing cats from your yard, this instrument will do it. Every time the cats would come around, basking in the weak fall sunshine and getting pats (and catnip), Ken would pick it up and they would scatter fast! Of course, I'm just teasing Ken because I know he reads this occasionally. We enjoy both his ecentricities and his music!

Oh, one more Sunday Soup note. After reading Anne's comment last week about her SS and the possibility of using mugs, I totally stole the idea. Of course, my inclination was to go to Williams Sonoma and buy the two handle soup bowls with saucers that go with my dishes, but The Southerner thought we should try GIRO (the recycle center/thrift shop here). I was not too excited about that because...while I don't like to think of myself as a grown-up, I do like some grown-up things and matching dishes is one of those things. Anyway, I gave in because I was sorely lacking in funds. Boy did they have some ugly mugs. And thus the Ugly Mug Club was born. I now have seven ugly mugs, and I encourage anyone who comes to Sunday Soup, to bring their own ugly mugs. We might even have prizes for the ugliest one someday. Watch for pictures next week. Oh, and instead of $150 for WS soup bowls, we spent two loonies.