Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

blue soup and bricks

Forget brick soup (See: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass), I have been whiling away my waking hours today by combining a search for the brick that fills my neighbours dreams and constructing a soup of such surpassing vileness that I have startled even myself.

Now, which nonsense to explain first?

Bricks first I suppose; sometime ago in the dim and distant past, in the great storms of 2005 a part of our back garden wall blew down. This, not not surprisingly has been the cause of much woe, not to mention wailing and gnashing of teeth. However, after the interventions of many folk, including the country's finest retired legal brain, what had previously been an obstacle and a headache to all concerned, has now been downgraded to the lesser trauma of being a major pain in the bum.

In my capacity as clerk of works, or possibly ringmaster, I have spent several days now attempting to square a circle. Our very nice neighbours are graciously chipping in to the wall reconstruction fund, with but one caveat, that the bricks used to reconstruct said wall should be the same as those used to modify their house and to construct the summer house/romper room at the bottom of the garden. Forgive me for a moment while I get technical (tedious) about bricks; when these houses were built in 1846, the garden walls were constructed as simply and cheaply as possible, using whatever were the cheapest bricks available at the time. In our case, this is predominantly a red stock brick which was imported from Portugal as ballast, mixed with the more familiar London yellow stocks (which came up the thames on barges from Kent, don't say you never learn anything on this blog).

When our neighbours had their house extended, various conservatories and the summer house built, they (I use the term loosely) used a brick that was made in Luton, in the London Brick Co's brickfields, perfectly good brick and not too anachronistic. Unfortunately, mergers and downsizing occurred, and that brickworks closed in 1999. As far as I can tell, it is now a retail park, although it might be where Amazon.uk have their warehouse. This means that, to all intents and purposes, the bloody bricks no longer exist, our local builders merchant still stock them; like a ghost on the machine, but after three weeks of negotiations, when I actually tried to buy 10.000 of them, it was a case of; 'sorry guv, they don't seem to have any, sure you don't mean chailey bricks?'

The brick I want is called Challney, if, as I have done several times today, I write a letter or e-mail to a builders merchant or brick distributor and put in 16 point type at the top: NO I DON'T WANT BLOODY CHAILEY BRICKS, sooner or later, I guarantee, some donkey will offer me that choice. So, here I am, wanting to buy 10.000 bricks, and wanting to get the works under way in August as this is when the builder is available, our neighbour is sunning himself and famille in tuscany for another ten days, and nobody has heard of my brick.

Small wonder I was driven to make soup, I suppose the day after the hottest day on record is probably not the most sensible time to be constructing warming and nourishing food, but for some time in my quest for knowledge I have been wanting to experiment with cauliflower. To be more specific, I have wanted to use the purple headed variety. I have cooked it before as a vegetable, and been fascinated to note that, once steamed and left to go cold, it turns the most extraordinary Parker Quink blue colour. Now, I'm not sure, but there seems to be a natural human instinct that says; blue food = bad. So I thought, why not make the soup and see if psychologically this proves to be the case. So, in between brick searches, I have made my soup. Rather traumatically, it is currently a dirty lavender shade, which, whilst unattractive is not actively repellent, I'm hoping that if I let it cool down, and leave it for 24 hours it might actually turn blue. It actually tastes very nice, even if it looks like melted raspberry icecream.

I seem to recall from my various forays into the world of science, that it is possible to use cabbage water as an indicator for acidity/alkalinity (although the colour change is not as extreme as litmus), so maybe if I fiddle about with the pH of my soup I might get the true blue that I desire. I'll keep you posted.

posted by Lampy @ 7/20/2006 07:04:00 pm