My pide and joy

I've spent the afternoon in a soup kitchen. My kitchen, in fact, making 10 litres of homegrown soup to freeze in portions for lunch at work.
Having finally conceded that summer has departed, I figured it was time my summer crops did the same. So this weekend I ripped out the tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and beans (although I've given the basil a stay of execution because I reckon I can get another jar of pesto out of it, just as soon as I buy some pine nuts). I also dug up a couple of stray onions, a couple of carrots and a handful of finger-sized 'Urenika' potatoes that were hiding under the rampant apple mint.
There's only one thing to do with that sort of end-of-season harvest hodge-podge... and that's make soup. Chop it all up, bung in some chicken stock or a bacon hock, and boil the bejeezus out of it. Easy peasy.
I made a special trip to the supermarket to buy the bacon hock (although apparently the Mad Butcher sells the best ones in town) because my mum always made soup using a bacon hock. Must admit I was a bit horrifed when I found them in the butchery department: they look much too much like a pig's leg for my liking. And, after boiling it down in a big stockpot of water for a couple of hours, my house smelt like worringly like an abbatoir. Yes, I remember that smell from childhood trips to the petfood factory. Probably explains my early (and now lapsed) conversion to vegetarianism.
Soup rocks. I made mine using a packet of Kings soup mix for the base - split peas, lentils, barley, alphabet pasta etc - because (and this will reveal how long it has been since I last made soup) the blimen supermarket no longer sells any of those ingredients in the bulk bins. The bulk bin aisle is clearly considered naff these days. Unless you want to buy pineapple lumps on the cheap.
But I digress. My soup ultimately also featured: the boiled-down foot of a small pig, a couple of Oxo stock cubes, a hearty splash of Worcestershire sauce, carrots, onions, tomatoes, capsicums, spinach, chilli, courgettes and chopped up purple potatoes. (I soon discovered that when you add purple potatoes to soup, it all goes a very peculiar shade of purple-brown)
Now soup just isn't soup without crunchy, buttery garlic bread. So yesterday I bought some delicious Turkish pide bread for $4 from the French farmers' market at La Cigale in Parnell. Then I figured, I'm sure I can make that stuff myself! A little trawling of the internet later and I found this recipe (I found others, but they required either eggs or yoghurt, neither of which I have in my fridge at the moment).
Making Turkish pide bread was definitely easier than making ciabatta, as the dough actually looked like dough. And it rose when it said it should. And it stuck to my fingers when it said it would. I halved the recipe to make 5 mini-pides (that's lunch Monday-through-Friday sorted), rolled out the dough, poked holes in it with my fingers, brushed it with olive oil and sprinkled it with sea salt. Then I baked it on the pizza stone in my barbecue.
The verdict? It looks just like the bought stuff.