Cerenety Stoup

Well, it's been a rather hectic year and that is the reason for the lack of blog posts. But... from now on I have come up with the genius idea of having volunteers do a weekly blog themselves about what is going on at Cerenety. That way, not only can I be lazy and disorganised but we get to see things from the views of different cultures, nationalities, ages and ideas. So here's the first one from our very own Australian James McDonald.

For last night’s dinner Ben, one of the other volunteers here at Cerenity, and I decided to create a soup completely out of fruits, vegetables and other edible organic matter growing onsite. With a great deal of enthusiasm we collected as much of a variety of ingredients as possible hoping that our one-pot wonder would provide a tasty treat for the other volunteers. And, as it turned out, it was amazing!

Our soup contained;

• Potatoes from the vegetable patch,
• Tomatoes from the polytunnel,
• Some cooking apples,
• Garlic from the vegetable patch,
• Blackberries from the hedges,
• Mushrooms found in the field,
• Courgettes from the vegetable patch,
• Carrots from the vegetable patch,
• Chives from the herb garden,
• Coriander from the herb garden,
• Nettle Leaves growing around the vegetable patch,
• and some kale.

So ALL of the ingredients come from the ground of the camp site grounds. All together and chopped up it looked like this…

Once it was all chopped up and chucked in the Dutch Oven we filled it with water to cover and left it to cook for an hour over a fire using a fire tripod.

We then sat there in the rain around the fire watching our meal cook. It was a massive success, everyone enjoyed it and we decided to call it ‘Cerenity Stoup’ because we don’t quite know if it is a soup or a stew. It was immensely satisfying knowing that our ‘stoup’ was completely derived from the land so it is needless to say that we will try to do more of these meals in the future.