Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

I had a minor culinary disaster yesterday, a phone call and a lapse of concentration and I created a flambed leek soup, rather than the leek and potato I was aiming for. Happily I had some watercress lurking in the pantry and was able to throw together an alternative. Later inspection revealed that the soup wasn't quite as ruined as I had previously thought, and I set it aside for the morning. As the kitchen is sub-arctic I didn't worry about decanting it into a pot and fridging it, just pushed it to the back of the stove and forgot about it.

When I got up this morning to make the coffee, I was aware of my soup lurking in a soup like way, and continued to ignore it. The cat, I should perhaps explain, is, like the rest of us, beginning to come to terms with his christmas over indulgence. The vet, when I took him in for his booster, was a little terse; 'No, it's not big hair, he's a bit porky.' So the boy is restricted to 60g of griblets per day, scientifically weighed on an electronic scale. As it is still frozen solid outside, his opportunities for takeaways are somewhat limited, so he is reduced to piteous wailing and supplicatory paw waggling whenever he has an audience. As I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I fed the cat his breakfast, which vanished like snow in the sunshine, and wandered back to bed with the coffee. The cat followed along shortly after, to claim a few moments duvet time.

Some time later, The Arts Correspondent went for the top up, and came back looking confused: 'Have you been eating the soup?'

I answered in the negative, but there was indeed a large lacuna in the soup pan, roughly the size of a small tomcats head. The cat drowsed on in innocent sleep (see pic of cat in innocent pose). He does indeed seem to have developed a taste for cold leek soup, the only positive is that he doesn't seem to get wind from it.