Month: September 2021

Thai Pumpkin Soup

This is an absolutely fantastic pumpkin soup found at Waitrose

Serves 4 genously

Ingredients

  • 1kg pumpkin or butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and cut into 1cm cubes
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 2.5cm piece fresh root ginger, peeled and finely chopped
  • 4 tsp Bart Red Thai Curry Paste
  • 450ml vegetable stock
  • 400ml can Bart Spices Coconut Milk
  • 142ml pot single cream
  • 20g pack fresh basil, chopped

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to 180 C
  2. Place the pumpkin or butternut squash on a non-stick baking tray and season. Roast for 30 minutes, or until tender.
  3. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a medium pan and add the onion and ginger.
  4. Cover and saute; for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  5. Stir in the curry paste and cook for 1-2 minutes, then add the pumpkin, stock and coconut milk.
  6. Cover and bring to the boil, then allow to simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cool slightly.
  7. Puree the soup in a food processor or blender in 2 batches, until smooth. Return to the pan, season to taste and reheat gently, adding a little more stock or boiling water for a thinner consistency if required.

Serving

Place the cream and chopped basil in a small pan and heat gently. Serve the soup in bowls with the basil cream swirled over the top and sprinkled with freshly ground black pepper, and with crusty granary bread on the side.

Derin is Reading

30 December 2013

Derin has started reading.
It’s only in the past week or so that he has started talking coherently (to us). A couple of days ago he was in our bed early in the morning on a work day (he had woken too late to go back to sleep, but too early to ignore) and Sheb had got up. He was sitting in the bed and when she came into the room he patted the mattress beside him and said “Mummy, come bed. Night night.” That was 3-4 days ago.
Now today he has shown that he can read numbers. It started with something earlier today – can’t remember what right now – where he said “Five. Five” and there was a “5” on a bottle/box/label. Then this evening when Bruce was brushing Derin’s teeth Derin started pointing at a Listerine mouth wash bottle and saying “Six. Six. Six” On checking, it turned out that the label said “6 benefits” or something.
It’s crazy late – now after 10pm, but we did a quick test a few minutes ago, writing numbers on his whiteboard, and he knows 4, 5, 6, 7. He said “nine” for “2”. Unfortunately it was too late for more testing. He was too tired. Strangely, the 5, 6, 7 were said in English, with Bruce writing the numbers. When Sheb wrote “4” he said “dort” (“four”). Is this a coincidence? We don’t know… yet.
Interesting though that his first word was “bir” (“one”), his first coherent string of words was “one, two, three, …, ten”, and the first characters that he can read were “5” and “6”
More experiments tomorrow!

Counting

Derin started counting properly today. (30 December 2013)
Until now he has been saying numbers to himself or repeating after us, but this evening we were at Rich & Ali’s and Sheb was sticking magnets to the fridge and he was counting them “one, two, three” etc as she put them on. Then when she started him off in Turkish he carried on counting in Turkish.
In English he could count all the way to ten. In Turkish he could get to 8 (“sekiz”) but couldn’t remember 9 (“dokuz”), so he skips that and goes straight to 10 (“on”).

Baby pronouns

Today (8 December 2013) Derin pointed at a photo of himself (the halloween one when he was about 6 months old) and said “me”.
This is very interesting for two reasons:

He recognises himself and knows that he is a person/thing that can be in photos.

He said “me”. Normally young babies will say “you” when they are referring to themselves because that is what they hear everyone else referring to them as.