Monday, September 27, 2010

Green Peas Soup (With Step-by-Step photos)

Lie - Life have been so busy that I seldom cook nowadays…
 
Truth - Ok, in actual fact, my mum nagged that I don’t clean up so I have been barred from the kitchen.
 
In any case, I managed to do some cooking lately. My mum reluctantly allowed me back into the kitchen because I had braces installed recently. It was a dark moment for me. I couldn’t express in words how miserable I was. 
 
I couldn’t eat any solid food. For two consecutive day, I was on a plain porridge and preserved vegetables diet. To a foodie like me, life had no purpose anymore… I regretted putting on braces a lot and still is.
 
Worrying for my mental and kidneys’ health, I decided to spice up my liquid food diet. First and foremost, the diet needs to be healthier and more well-balanced. So, I bought loads of fresh vegetables from the supermarket and thought that western-style soup would be a great liquid diet to incorporate whatever nutrients I need during this difficult period.
 
First posting on blog will be – Green Peas Soup. I had learnt this recipe from Nigella Lawson. She also named the soup as “Slime Soup”.
 
Western soup is very easy to make and hardly require any cooking skill. I reckon that if you know how to boil water, you can definitely cook this.
 
Of course, I had made some changes to her recipe to suit my needs and taste buds. Here is my version of Green Peas soup.
 
Ingredients:
 

One medium-sized potato (preferably Russell potato) – for carbohydrate and as thickener to thicken the soup.

Some cloves of Garlic – depending on how much you like them. Garlic can lower cholesterol, I read somewhere, so I always like to eat a lot of them as health food.   

Somehow, I decided to go with vegetable stock cube instead of the meat ones. I wanted a clean vegetable taste. By all means, if you want to use chicken stock. I think beef and fish stock will be too overpowering.

Erm nope, we are still making green peas soup. I haven’t been eating much vegetable then. Thus, I panicked a little and added a little of whatever I have to “make up” for losses.

Cauliflowers – two golf-ball knob.

A bunch of spinach.

About 200 grams of frozen green peas.

A few handful of Parmesan Cheese

Method:

Boil some water in a pot. I added milk to it to give it a richer taste.

Add in the stock-cube for flavour.

First in high heat, add in the potatoes and garlic. Leave it to boil for about 5 minutes before adding the cauliflower.

Turn it down to medium heat and let it further simmer for 3 minutes before adding in the spinach and then green peas.

Let it boil for about 2 minutes. Do not over-boiled the green peas.

Take the pot off the heat.

Ladle a few heaps of the soup mixture into a liquidizer like the above. A word of caution – the mixture is quite hot. Do not over-fill the mixture. Fill up to about one-third of the container. Blend them in batches. Also, do put a wet-towel above the lid as the steam will escape and scale your hand.

Because you blended the mixture in batches. Some scoops might have more ingredients than others. To balance them up, mix them well the pot when bringing them to a boil. You can also re-adjust the thickness with more milk or water.

During this stage, add in the few handful of parmesan cheese. You decided how cheesy you want this soup to be.

After adding in the parmesan cheese, taste whether the soup needs any salt or pepper. I did add a small pitch of salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper.

I think the green peas can be quite sweet and can do with a tad more salt to give it a savoury edge.


Serve it piping hot. With a touch more of Parmesan Cheese for extra kick.

 
A satisfying, healthy and tasty meal. Immediately, braces seem more bearable…

No comments: