A friend pointed out to me recently that no matter what I plan on doing, I always assume it will only take half and hour. And I am always wrong. I should have paid more attention. I thought a moment of organisation – making soup to take with me to work for lunch – this morning would be done and dusted in 30 minutes.

Three hours later and I have an orange kitchen (I was thinking of doing it up at some point, but orange streaks were never part of the plan) and Norman has taken to hiding by the back door to remove himself from the utter chaos. On the upside, I do have seven lunches – healthy (ish) lunches too, I might add – for the next two weeks in the office.  Hooray!

Should you have a spare three hours to do the same and simultaneously decorate your kitchen, here’s what to do:

Send your Mum this picture to find out if you have the quantities right:

You don’t. You need less than half a bag of potatoes.

Cut up the peppers and tomatoes, sprinkle with olive oil, herbs, salt and pepper (a la Gorgeous Godson’s Dads advice) and pop in the oven for aaaages.

Slice and fry up the onion.

Throw some potatoes in a pan with some stock until they are getting mushy.

Quality check a few of the tomatoes on a piece of toast.

Put batches of the cooked peppers, tomatoes, onion and mushy potato in the Nutribullet to make it all smooth.

Discover the reason you should not put hot things in a Nutribullet is because some weird suction think happens and you can’t get the bottom of the damn thing off. Repeat anyway.

Throw everything back in the pan and taste. Get that funny feeling in your gills because it’s rather bitter. Detract entirely from the healthy aspect of the soup by adding a few spoon fulls of brown sugar. Taste and approve changes.

Ladle into zip bags that can be popped in the freezer, dropping large quantities in that really annoying gap between the cooker and work bench.

If feeling particularly organised, add making some bread rolls (from a packet….let’s not get silly here). They turned out quite well:

Well, it might have taken a little over the anticipated half an hour, but I do now have seven soup lunches with tomato and Parmesan rolls, and a few spares. Not bad for about £5. I’m just still not sure about the orange decorations. I’d better get scrubbing :o)