We're going on a Slug Hunt

I took out a torch and caught a dozen or so smallish slugs roaming around my pots in the (very cold -- I thought they were cold-blooded? It's only a few degrees above freezing) dark. I imagine that explains what happened to my mesembryanthemums... and to another batch of slow-growing succulent-type seedlings that had just begun to take off after almost two months, when the most promising plant was eaten through last night at the stem and left with its plump leaves decapitated across the compost.

Unfortunately I wasn't equipped with any very effective means of dealing with them. I no longer have a sharp trowel to cut them in half, and while I normally condemn slugs to shrivel to death on the scorching hot tiles below my balcony, simply dropping them off (or even flicking them as far as possible) isn't necessarily going to stop them climbing back up in search of greenstuff. Perhaps I should have taken a bowl of boiling water with me. (I'm not prepared to waste that much salt...)

It was certainly too cold for bare feet. My toes are still burning with returning circulation.

Mulligatawny

The mulligatawny soup made with remains of a rabbit -- in my case, rabbit stock and some shredded roast rabbit -- proved to be extremely successful. I didn't have any curry powder, so I went the whole hog of cooking up ginger and garlic with my onion at the start and adding chopped chilli and cumin and coriander, and it was very tasty.

I served it alongside a bowl of "well-boiled rice" as recommended in the recipe, presumably a nod to its Indian origins, which served to make more sustaining what was really only suitable as a starter -- the small proportion of meat isn't bulked out by anything bar onion and apple, and I hadn't thickened it with flour as directed because it already seemed pretty thick. Perhaps I should have.

I note that in the recipe for a plum mulligatawny in my 1960s cookbook the rice is cooked in the actual soup, which is a less unexpected procedure!