A dusting of snow

I woke up to snow in the garden.

I thought this might reduce my slug population, but the Internet says not. I'm still hoping that it will reduced the population of other pests though.

Smoky roasted pepper and squash soup

I made another soup today to use up more of my squashes and stuff I had in the fridge. I'm now down to just four small ones. Just as well I didn't have to feed myself over winter from my produce, I'd currently be trying to survive on kale and Swiss chard (and the Swiss chard has gone a bit funny). Anyhow, the soup tasted lovely, so I thought I'd share the recipe. You will need a liquidiser for this. If you don't have one, then cut the potatoes much smaller (and maybe consider peeling them too) and cut the peppers much smaller after you've roasted them.
The soup takes about an hour to make, much of which is cooking not prep time, and makes about 6 portions:

Ingredients
2 winter squash "sweet dumpling" – 1 medium & 1 large – or 1 large butternut squash or equivalent
2 large red peppers
2 large yellow peppers
about 2 tbsp olive oil
4 medium/large potatoes
1 vegetable stock cube (I used a Kallo one)
5 tsp smoked paprika

Method
1. Turn the oven on to 180° C (fan)/350° F (fan).
2. Cut open the squashes and remove the seeds with a spoon, then cut into wedges (don't bother to remove the skin).
3. Halve the peppers and remove the seeds and stalk, then cut each pepper half into quarters (so you end up with 16 pieces).
4. Put the squash wedges and peppers in a roasting tray, glug over the olive oil and swoosh around to make sure they're all fairly evenly covered with oil.
5. Roast in the oven for 40 minutes.
6. Meanwhile, clean the potatoes and leaving the skin on, cut them up into large chunks and put them in a pan.

Spot the deliberate mistake: it didn't occur to me to make my potatoes while the peppers and squash were roasting, so this is a picture of my roasted peppers next to my raw potatoes.

7.  Add about 1 pint of boiling water (this isn't quite enough to cover the potatoes, but I like my soups thick and you can always add more liquid later).
8. Put the lid on the pan, turn on the heat and bring the potatoes to the boil, then simmer until they come apart easily when poked with a fork - it took me about 20 minutes in total, including the time during which they were coming to the boil, after which I turned the heat down to let them simmer.
9. Once the potatoes are done, take off the heat and add the stock cube to them and their water.
10. Wait until the squash and peppers have finished roasting and have cooled enough to touch comfortably, then scrape the flesh of the squash off its skin and into the pan of potatoes using a spoon.
11. Add the peppers to the pan, then add the 5 tsp of smoked paprika. Stir.
12. Once it is cool enough for your liquidiser, liquidise it (it may already be cool enough at this stage, as both the peppers and potatoes have had time to cool).
13. Reheat (if necessary) to serve, or store it for later.

You can freeze excess soup flat in bags. If you freeze it flat, it defrosts more quickly and easily. To get it flat, just put it in the bags, seal them without excess air and then put them on a flat worktop and use your hand to smooth the contents of the bag until fairly flat. Once cool enough (room temperature), transfer to a relatively level and flat surface within the freezer (I often freeze mine on top of a pizza box). You can stack them on top of each other, but make sure the outsides of the bags are nice and dry or they will stick together and be difficult to separate later.
I make the soup as thick as possible before freezing and thin it down with additional water if it needs any after I've defrosted it (I like soup so thick you're pretty much eating baby food and just pretending you're a grown up by calling it soup).