The recipe for pea soup from the Ballymaloe Cookery School cookbook, with some freshly-picked mint leaves.
I set myself a little project to get better at cooking soups. My previous approach had been to lump everything I could find from the fridge into a pot and boil. Not surprisingly, the results weren’t great. So I decided to follow the method laid out in the Ballymaloe Cookery School cookbook, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while (it came out in 2007). One of the easiest soups to make is pea soup. Last summer, I grew my own peas, onions and mint, which meant I had almost all the ingredients for pea soup (the peas were a type called Daniel O’Rourke supplied by Seedsavers). Maybe it’s my farm upbringing, but there is something particularly satisfying about eating food that one has planted, grown and harvested. The first time, I followed the recipe to the letter which meant adding bacon and cream. It was delicious. But I wanted to make a healthier and vegetarian version, so I dropped the cream and bacon, and used a little olive oil to sweat the onions rather than butter. Turns out that the soup still tastes great.
Because this winter has been so mild, my herbs have continued growing – even through the brief bouts of frost over the last few weeks. Through looking a bit bedraggled, there is sage, oregano, thyme and plenty of mint in the raised bed where I planted them last summer. All my peas are well gone by now(apart from some I kept for seed), so I used a mixture of frozen garden peas and frozen runner beans – works fine too. I made a batch a few weeks ago and brought it while hiking in Connemara. It might not quite have conjured up the vision of a hot summer day, but the soup was a welcome antidote to the bitter January wind that day.
Summer harvest: freshly picked onions, mint and Daniel O’Rourke peas from my back garden. I used the long green stalks of the onion in the soup too.