Velvet Antlers Lentil & Bacon Soup

Velvet Antlers Lentil and Bacon soup

Here is another all time favourite of ours, made frequently through the winter months in our massive pot which Dave got for christmas a couple of years back. This soup, like most homemade soup of course, can’t really be beaten for being gorgeous to eat, very healthy and being cheap and really easy to make.

Ingredients:

350 grams red split lentils
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
5 slices of bacon medallions
2 medium onions
3 carrots
3 sticks of celery
1.6 litres of water
Salt and black pepper

Wash the lentils in a sieve and then leave to soak in warm water for 30 minutes. In the meantime, chop the bacon and vegetables. Heat the oil then fry the bacon and add the vegetables, frying until soft.

Drain the lentils and add these and the water to the vegetables. Add the salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove any scum and for best results leave to cool for a while and blend the soup.

Enjoy. And thanks for all the messages letting me know how much you enjoyed my gingerbread!

Summer sale now on!

We all know someone who has a birthday coming soon, or someone that is due to move house or someone that is about to have a baby. Well now you can stop worrying about what to buy them as Velvet Antlers now has 20% off all hampers! We can deliver to their home or you can surprise them at work with a hamper full of tasty treats and the beauty of it is, that not only are they currently on sale, they can’t fail to enjoy their lovely present – who doesn’t like good food?! And do you know things just get better and better as we are accepting delivery dates on sale prices right up until 30th August 2008 so you can buy them now at their sale price and not have to worry about forgetting that all important birthday. Genius.

What is Scottish style? competition

We’ve obviously spent a fair bit of time thinking about this recently so we could try and perfect our hampers. But we really wondered what other people think good Scottish Style is.

So here is a wee challenge for ya (with a wee beauty of a prize if you do well!):

Comment on this post and tell us of a simple thing, thought, icon, image or phrase that characterises modern Scottish style, right now, in 2007.

The best comment by December 1st will win a Wee Beauty hamper – so get thinking! We’ll announce it on here.

Quite apart from the prize, we’d really appreciate the comments, just to discuss it and hear other folks thoughts. We want to see if we’ve got it right, and figure out how we can tweak our styling to make it even cooler!

Convenient customers only

If you watch telly you’ll probably remember the advert about ‘brand new customers only’. If you didn’t, watch the you tube below. It’s a smart advert because it hit a bit of a chord. There are so many services that want to squeeze out the not so convenient customers just to make a wee % more profit, or just because they just want to skip the hassle of dealing with ‘you’ because ‘you are different’.

In our business, we found the same thing going on. The inconvenience we create is our location – the highlands. When we shop on the net, we perk up when we see the words “We deliver to all UK mainland addresses”. It’s usually only once we’ve chosen something and hit ‘proceed to checkout’ that the small print flags up “deliveries to Scottish highlands and islands carry an extra charge of [£ a lot]”.

Our attitude is that if you want to buy our products, we will remove barriers for you, not put them up. So if you are a ‘different’ request or need from most others, just get in touch with us.

Dave MacLeod's introduction

Since Claire kicked off the Velvet Antlers blog with her own story, I better tell fill in the other half of the Velvet Antlers picture. I got started in working for myself as a rock climber, running lectures and coaching sessions or writing guidebooks or articles about my favourite sport.

Working for myself in a little ‘niche’ interest area like climbing taught me some amazing things. Before my first experiences in business, I always thought, like many folks, that things in life ‘should’ be a certain way. And if they weren’t that way, it was someone’s fault for not sorting it out. Through my climbing related work, I learned that if you find things that aren’t as they should or could potentially be, it’s your own responsibility to do something about it. And what’s more, it’s possible to change some quite big thing you might not have though possible.

I guess this is not news for plenty of people, but it was a big wake up call for me. As soon as I started thinking with this mindset, I got excited for all sort of projects as I’m sure most young business people do. So when Claire raised the idea of Velvet Antlers hampers and talked to me about how no one was making a product with a Scottish identity that was, to put it squarely, ‘cool enough’. I was really psyched to work on it with her.

Apart from bouncing the ideas and processes back and forth between us to develop the idea and the products, my main tack so far has been to build this website. Although I’ve run my own websites for a year or so and built them up myself, this was my first time designing and building a site from scratch. If your savvy about sites and web design, I’d really appreciate if you commented anything you noticed about the site that I could improve. I really am a novice here so need all the help I can get.

Next up for me will be trying to talk to people about the hampers we’re making (including through this blog or course) .

Why are Christmas hampers the coolest Christmas present idea you ever stumbled upon?

It’s one of those things that should, in theory, be quite good fun…

The idea of looking around for nice things to buy your friends and family should be quite a cool activity. But let’s be brutally honest, the reality is it lies somewhere on a continuum between ‘a challenging task’ and ‘a real stress’ most of the time. You may even wish to put it more bluntly than I have. The reason why is obvious – everyone has everything they need. Isn’t it true?

Well, not quite. If you think about it, you can always think of one or two things you could do with (and if someone managed to second guess your mind, you would be a happy lad/lassie on Christmas). But unfortunately, when it’s you buying gifts for Christmas, birthdays etc you rarely have access to that gold dust – stress saving information.

So you end up stressing, getting something they might already have or don’t really want. What a waste. These days, everyone has so many possessions. There’s just no way round it. So gift giving will become harder and harder and less satisfying every year.

And all we are after is something really nice – a wee treat – that gives both you as the giver, and your lucky recipient a good feeling.

Good food and good style will always be something you can give again and again, and your recipient will never already have too much of it. That’s why a hamper (a really cool one, like these!) is the best Christmas present idea you ever stumbled upon.

PS: If you can think of some other belters of Christmas present ideas that aren’t something people can already have too much of – please comment below and let us know the great ideas you’ve had. We might even start making them (better)!