Grandma Jac's Marrow and Courgette Soup

Grandparents are great, they are like your mum and dad, but where your parents are expected to teach you right and wrong and life’s lessons and how to behave and all that jazz, grandparents are exempt from distributing disciplinary action. So in short, they are like your parents, but more fun.

It doesn’t just apply to playing games either; the confusingly contradictory battle of double standards extends to the kitchen as well. Mum won’t let you eat some things and then force you to eat others (I recall several hours spent locked in the boot of our estate car for refusing point blank to eat my cauliflower, I didn’t even mind the stuff, it was a matter of principal), whereas Granny will feed you and feed you until you burst and let you get down from the table whenever you please.

I am happy to say that things haven’t changed!

I woke up at 9am this morning in West Sussex to the smell of bacon wafting up the stairs, I pretty much fell down them to get to the kitchen, knocking my already oversized head on the doomsday beams on the way down, and found Grandma Jac beastin’ out brekkie over the Aga.

“How many eggs would you like boy”?

“Oh, one’s en-ouef Jacco”!

The joke was lost on her the first time round as her hearing is somewhat lacking, it was, as you can imagine, still very amusing when she finally got close enough to hear me shout it at her. I didn't have the strength to crack another . . .

It conspired that she had good reason for being asleep at 8:30pm the previous evening, the alarm set downstairs, me tucked up in bed, no TV, sin signal. She had to rise at around half past six and begin making a pan of marrow and courgette soup, all home grown of course, that we could have for our lunch. Two meals ready by 9am is good going by anyone’s standards, the fact we were leaving at 11:30 hadn’t fazed her and out came the Tupperware so the soup could make the journey back to Hertfordshire, along with me, my big sister, her cat-mauling-chicken-killing but peculiarly affectionate Jack Russell, and a bag full of swiftly thawing cow thigh bones whose odour was rapidly masking that of the our lunch.

(Foodnote: Speaking of forbidden foods re: the parents, I was never allowed pushpops as a child as they are essentially one big sugary E number. I bought one the other day as I’m now a big boy and can make my own decisions; my finger was too chubby to fit in the hole. Bum out.)

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

450g marrow and courgettes, grated (a few courgette shavings to garnish)

1 pint of chicken stock

½ tspn curry powder

1 pot of Philadelphia (smaller size)

Butter

Double Cream

Salt

Pepper

Method:

1. In a saucepan melt a little butter and cook the marrow and courgettes for 1 minute, add the curry powder, seasoning and stock and simmer until soft. Add the Philadelphia and stir through until smooth, blend and season further to taste.  

2. Serve with some courgette shavings, a drizzle of cream and a couple of turns of pepper.