Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup

I am not a big soup fan in general, but recently I have decided to reconsider this principle.
One thing that inspired this was a delicious carrot and coriander soup made by my lovely cousin Lindis - I have spent some twenty years avoiding carrot and coriander soup, but this was so delicious I had to have second helpings.
I have also perhaps reached an age where comforting food that is nevertheless not hugely over-filling is a useful addition to my life.
So for tonight I made pea and basil soup.
Very gently fry a macedoine of carrrots, onions and garlic until soft (takes longer than you can imagine), then add stock and peas, and bring to a simmer. Add a handful of basil and season, then simmer for ten minutes before blending with the soup gun.
On my own initiative I crumbled in some 'Bulgarian sheeps' cheese' from our local Turkish shop (aka feta), which added the right salty note.
Yum!

How do you say it again?

Everything I've ever read about quinoa tells you how to pronounce it, so I'm not going to add my mispronunciation to the general melee.
I had always assumed it was horrible, or at least indigestible, just like all the other stodgy, worthy stomach-ache-inducing foods health fiends try to persuade one to eat. But recently Jane, a blogger whose taste I trust, said she had cooked quinoa for dinner just because she liked it.
That made it worth a try, so tonight I cooked quinoa and spicy tomato and mushroom sauce. The sauce was a little over-chillified and the Man is not keen on chilli mushrooms, so it wasn't an entirely successful experiment, but the quinoa itself turned out to be very nice. Flavour-wise, I couldn't rate it much higher than innocuous, but the texture was lovely - soft, nubbly seeds with crispy, crunchy elements.
The next stage is to try it out on the Kitchen Accomplice. If she likes it, it will be a valuable extension of our repertoire.

Granny Cooked

When my cousin Thomas was small, our mutual grandmother was concerned he was eating too much junk food. As a moral lesson, she trained her Pekinese dogs to do a new trick. You put a piece of food (they particularly liked bits of Victoria sponge) in front of them and said 'Junk food'. They would sneer. 'Crisps' - the same reaction. 'Burgers', 'chicken nuggets', 'chips' or 'biscuits' would all be scorned by Bangs or Azalea.
Then before the poor beast starved to death in front of your eyes, you would say 'Granny Cooked!' and the dog would gobble up the finally licit morsel.
I'm not sure Thomas really took this to heart as a lesson (although he is now a very devoted organic gardener and disciple of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall), but I was much impressed.
Granny Cooked notwithstanding, there are certain convenience foods I still find irresistable.
Hash browns, curly fries, waffles - there's a processed potato theme here, I realise.
I have started stocking hash browns in the freezer for the Kitchen Accomplice when she gets in from school.
This week i also invested in Toastabags, thinking they would be good for preparing hash browns.
But when I asked how it had gone, the young lady said cooking them from frozen was quite demanding.
"The toaster had to be popped like 1200 hundred times just to defrost them. So then I put them in the microwave. And then I fried them." By then, I guess, she was certain they were dead, so she ate them.