MoFo day Four: Exotic Family Soup!

  Today we have been baking  (see www.veganationdoesmofo.blogspot.com )and then visiting our friends.  Readers of my blog who are really paying attention will have noticed that we go and see friends a lot! We home educate so we're quite flexible and we feel we need to make sure that as well as the stuff we do at home we get out and about a lot so that the children get plenty of chance to see friends and do other activities. We were visiting our loveliest veggie friends who live just a short drive from us and while we were there the children did Book Group and had a ballet lesson! Thanks to our friends, we are now in possession of absolutely the best banana muffin recipe ever, and thanks to us, they now have our recipe for delicious carrot and potato soup, which is what our friends made for us today, along with delicious home made flatbread, and the obligatory Cream Crackers- no, I don't know why they're called that, either..!

Noah thinks I should make the Yule Log!

   This recipe was originally from a book called ''Food Allergy Survival Guide'' by Vesanto Melina, Jo Stepaniak and Dina Aronson, which we bought a few years ago when one of our children went gluten free for a year or two. It's an excellent, if rather 'frill-free' (i.e no pictures) vegan recipe book, but also a brilliant source of information and substitutions for foods such as wheat and soya. The recipe was called ''Creamy Carrot Bisque with Exotic Spices'' and we all loved it the first time we had it. It is a lovely bright orange colour from the carrots, and very rich and creamy, warming and spicy. It says in the book that as well as all the other things such as beta-carotene, it is a good source of molybdenum! Since then, we have had some times when it fell out of favour with Pony, but it has always come back 'in' again. Originally, we had another soup which we called 'Pony's Soup' because we happened to look back through our recipe book and noticed that we'd first made it on her birthday, many years before she was born. Because of this, Fin and Mouse were both wanting the Carrot Soup to be named after them, just because they loved it so much, and then Pony wanted a stake in it too, and then I guess WE probably threw our hats in the ring too, so now it is known as Exotic Family Soup, so No-ONE  is left out- oh, except you, of course..!

Gentle Smokey is still waiting for someone to choose him.

  We made another donation to Feline Care today- they are now just £10,000 short of their £70,000 goal to save the shelter after an astonishing whirl of fundraising by vegan manager Molly Farrar and her team of volunteers and helpers. If you haven't yet contributed and want to be part of it then your window of opportunity is closing, so do it now! Donate through their website, at www.felinecare.org.uk, and while we're on the subject of Feline Care- is there a lovely kind person out there in the U.K. who could offer sweet 17 year old Smokey a lap of his very own? You won't regret it, I promise you!