Almost entirely agree Mort - but I drink black tea/coffee. I can just about bear to make a roux sauce but only if I add loads of cheese. My mum was always making rice pudding - ych a fi! (Sorry to lapse into Welsh but it's just what's required!)

Indeed hh, I have much sympathy for the young Nigel! Oddly enough, although I haven't had it for y-e-a-r-s, I have no problem with macaroni cheese, although that's probably because it's heavily disguised with cheese. I can manage to make a roux, as long as I stop breathing!

Eldest nephew has always maintained that cooked cheese makes him vomit (strangely this was something one of my brothers (not his father) always said as a child, but now...) and on frequent occasions it has.
On the way back from football last week, his mum (my little sister) told him that they were having lasagne. He said 'I can't eat cheese sauce' and she replied that it was from Tesco so it was different. It was homemade cheese sauce and he ate the lot. And didn't vomit.

My mum said it could be something to do with childish superstition in his case (I was sick after eating cheese sauce, therefore...) and thereafter the stress of having to eat something that he thought was going to make him vomit, makes him vomit. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

It did make me wonder about my mum's reaction to crab. I only cooked it for her once (and you'd think she'd know having been brought up near Brighton) and she certainly threw up a lot, but she has that reaction to chilli and part of me suspects that I added chilli to the crab-fried rice I was cooking... I'll have to check the recipe when I'm in Durham.

I may have to buy pudding rice now... Nom.

Mort - is that recipe on the Observer page and I'm blind, or have they craftily missed it out? (and in which case could you be so kind as to post a version of it here? pretty please with a dash of cognac and balsamic fruit? )

hh, if you got some asparagus you could make a great stir-fry.  A bit of garlic, some soy sauce and white wine, juices made shiny and clingy with the merest bit of corn flour - NOM NOM NOM

 

And one or two other Brighton places got an honourable mention too.  I put it down to the discriminating clientele hereabouts.


I think it is something one can grow out of.  I find myself using less and less milk as I get older, not because I actively dislike it, but out of indifference really.

Now cheese, pace Don B, is a very different matter ...  

But whatever it is in milk that I can't bear, isn't present (or is heavily disguised) in cheese. I know, it's irrational really.

I had the horrible experience a few weeks ago (don't read this Mort) of a child at school sneezing all over me when she had a mouthful of milk...fortunately I didn't respond by throwing up all over her! I did scream though!

I am assuming that the starch that is released as the potato cooks, is released into the soup thus thickening it. And when you whizz the soup at the end, the starchy potato bits thicken it even more.
Is that right?
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I think by the time the soup has reached the "thin but tasty" stage it might be too late.  The question is whether you put in a potato at the outset.  It partly comes down to your veg-to-stock ratio; if you use lots of veg at the outset, you probably won't need to thicken it. 

I find that soup is one of those trial-and-error things; do it enough and you get an instinctive feel for it.  And of course it's down to personal taste as well.