METHOD:
Empty everything from the chest freezer onto the spare bed (yes, the freezer's in a bedroom). Identify the worst case of freezer burn. Luckily it happens to be a ham bone salvaged from the last family Christmas dinner, Lamb's Fry soup may not have been so appetising. Also grab a bag of frozen 1" diced red and green capsicums that are now mainly ice.
In a large buckled pot with a too-thin base, cover the ham bone with water, ideally collected via a rusty roof, filtered through decomposing vegetation and stored in a tank uncleaned for 3 years and containing (known items only) sunglasses, tape measure and four lead-topped roofing nails.
From the garden pick some forked hairy carrots, a few sticks of slug-chewed celery, parsley (going to seed) and thyme (looking good apart from cobwebs/spiders).
Fight your way through 30 years' accumulated garage junk to the root crop store and select onions (sprouting) and garlic (ditto).
Back to the bedroom and the bulk dry goods store (wardrobe). This is an excellent opportunity to use surplus galley items from a 2005 sailing trip. Assess the damage (sea air + tropical temperatures = rusty tins) and choose accordingly, namely chick peas and Italian tomatoes.
Finally to the kitchen for bay leaves (do they go off?), chillies (hanging beside the stove in possibly too humid conditions - is that mould?), peppercorns, salt, oil.
Bring the ham bone, water, roughly chopped hairy carrots, holey celery, sprouting onion, bay leaves, seedy parsley, peppercorns and cobwebby thyme to the boil. Suddenly realise you'll need to cook it for a least 2 hours to get a decent stock, so go and clean out the garage, wash the car and drain the flooded letterbox. Come back inside and clean the stove top, using baking soda and water to remove boiled-over baked-on ham stock.
After 2 hours strain into a too small bowl. Get a bigger bowl and repeat. Try to jam bowl #1 into the "dish drawer". Use newspaper to wrap broken wine glass and a screwdriver to re-attach sagging drawer slider.
From the sieve, pick out and reserve anything that looks remotely like it once had a curly tail and wallowed in mud. Hand feed gristle and fat to the neighbours' cat. Wash the floor with hot soapy water (messy pussy!). Realise you'll have to let the liquid settle overnight so the fat can rise to the surface, so abandon cooking for the evening and have a bottle of wine. When the stock is cool enough, transfer to the spare fridge (guess where?).
The next day, skim off the fat and have it on a sandwich. (Na, just kidding, I made that bit up.) Heat olive oil in the buckled thin-based pot. Remove from the heat when a blue haze develops and use a broomstick to de-activate the smoke alarm. Open all the windows. Gently fry hairy carrots, holey celery, sprouted onion/garlic and mouldy chilli, all chopped brunoise. (Sorry, but you'll have to pay $5500 and go to Chef School to find out what that means).
Spend 30 minutes reducing slushy pre-frozen capsicums from a 1" dice to brunoise size (ha! there's a clue) and add to the pot. The water content will help loosen the burnt onion/garlic. Add the ham stock which should come out of the bowl like a large jellyfish. Wear an apron. Have a big enough pot. Put the dirty jellyfish bowl on the bench with the growing mound that won't fit in the dish drawer.
Open the chick peas and rinse in a sieve (the same one you used yesterday that's still in the dish drawer, unwashed) then add to the pot. If the tinned tomatoes are whole, push them through the sieve for 15 minutes then give up and tip them in whole. Put the reserved pig back in. Bring back to the boil. Realise it will take a good hour for everything to cook, so get on the roof and clean out the guttering (again), mow the lawns (i.e. pull out the worst of the longest weeds) and fill the Commodore with oil and water. Think ahead and seach the garage for ice-cream containers (for soup storage). Empty bolts out of one and snap hardened glue off the lid of another. Sterilise.
Come inside and repeat baking soda stove cleaning exercise. Taste. If it tastes like vegetables boiled in water you're on the right track, so did mine. Add salt. Add more salt. If it now tastes like salty boiled vegetable water, head to the small freezer (guess where? WRONG, it's in the kitchen) and add a couple of frozen tomato paste cubes. (Admittedly home-made and a bit experimental). Still lacking? Give it a whizz with a stick blender. Thick salty vegetable water is somehow far more palatable than thin salty vegetable water.
Still tastes like s*it? OK, hit the main fridge (surprisingly also in the kitchen). Add a generous scoop of basil pesto. Don't worry if the pesto looks like a science experiment, underneath that furry stuff it's all good. Also drag out the parmesan which should be rock hard, cracked and almost incapable of being grated. Re-blend. Taste. Too salty? Add sugar. Shrug and realise there's nothing else that can be done.
When cool, fill ice-cream containers, one for work lunches (soup-of-the-week) and one to freeze.
Enjoy.
