MoFo Day Eighteen: Spicy Tomato Soup

Slightly lacking in MoFo today..!

  I think I might need to go and have a sly peek at my Counter-to-the-end-of-MoFo just so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel..!
  Our cats and our children keep waking us up at night so we're feeling a bit weary at the moment and not finding it so easy to get organised to fit MoFoing into the day. M and I are paying the price of being a little TOO successful at registering for MoFo- ended up registering twice, so M nobly rose to the challenge- and has been writing 'Veganation Does MoFo' alongside my writing this one. This means that we have to be exactly TWICE as interesting as everyone else in the food department so that all the excitement is divisible by two and we can write about half of it each! I guess most people could probably  find one interesting topic arising from their day's food, but we have to try and think of TWO! And the thing is, although obviously we ARE a very unusually fascinating family, who clearly have a LOT to say and share about vegan food, I'm beginning to secretly doubt whether we actually do have twice as many fascinating thoughts on food as everyone else.. ? So, anyway, there are twelve days, 5 hours, 58 minutes, 26 seconds and 432 milliseconds to go until the end of MoFo 2011 and today I managed to find a new recipe for the future as a sort of side effect of M cooking our main meal (unwritten rule of Double MoFo: if you cook the main meal then you own the MoFo rights!) so she's writing about that.

   Today we were having a Cannelloni dish which was one of those ones which tells you to get a jar of pre-prepared casserole or lasagne sauce, and the poster mentioned their preferred brand. It was an American brand, not one we'd heard of and we don't really like that sort of thing- they often are a bit bland and usually quite sweetened; we prefer to make our own.
  We decided to use the sauce we had on the enchiladas we had the other day as it was so nice, and would add a bit of zing to the dish. In fact, when I'd made the sauce and sampled it by dipping in a crust of bread it was so lovely that we all just stood there taking turns to dip in a crust of bread and 'try' some more..and then some more..and then some more!
   We had banana and red fruit smoothies for breakfast which are lovely but don't always leave you feeling as full for as long as a couple of pieces of wholemeal toast would do, so I think that we really did like the sauce but were also feeling a little bit hungry by then.

Molly said this was the biggest cheque they'd been given!

  The sauce needed a lot more water added for the Cannelloni dish, and that was what gave us the idea of turning it into a soup, so I added a bit more water and a little more tomato puree to some of the sauce and Voila!' (Mais oui, we had French this morning..!) we had a delicious little bowl of very warming, spicy soup. I like tomato soup with a bit of rice in and it would be extra special if you have some rosemary flatbread to go with it.
   By the way, Feline Care, the fantastic cat shelter that we support, just received an anonymous donation of £8,000 and have now exceeded their goal of £70,000 to permanently secure the future of the shelter. I can't say whether or not it was me who gave that amount, but we are all very happy that the shelter is safe. Feline Care, Thetford will now become a registered charity in its own right and will own the site and the shelter buildings. so it's a very significant step and we are all very happy that the future looks so bright for Feline Care, lovely vegan manager Molly Farrar and the 140+ very special cats in her care!
  By the way, our family did donate to help save Feline Care,  and when we visited we took homemade pizza for Molly and her partner Paul as they were so busy that they often didn't stop for proper meals, but, in case you're wondering, we weren't responsible for the very kind donation of £8,000- although we would have if we could!