I found yet another recipe to make using Tastespotting, which by the way continues to rock my face off. I just registered with their site and can now easily save my favorites, like a recipe box. I know many sites like foodtv.com and epicurious.com have their own recipe boxes, but I like how I can quickly give these a visual scan to see what tickles my fancy. You can see a screenshot of the site below. Check out their site. Do it.
The pea and basil soup sounded great, because I have been on a basil kick, and because I’ve been trying to make more soup. Also, this recipe is very quick and simple. The recipe can be found at this blog.
First you chop the celery and courgette. Don’t know what courgette is? Good, now I don’t feel so stupid. It’s zucchini. I don’t know why the name difference exists, but over the pond they call a car trunk a boot and a cigarette a fag, so I’ll just accept it and move on.
I took the chopped celery and zucchini and sauted in a small amount of canola oil for 7-8 minutes. Then i added the chopped garlic for 2-3 minutes. In the meantime I had boiled some water (more water than they called for in case I needed more), and once the veggies were soft I added the the 1.5 pints they called for.
Then I added the frozen peas. The recipe was vague on the amount of peas to use so I had one family sized bag of frozen peas. It looked like a ton but figured I would add them all. My rationale being that I could always add more water later, but adding peas later would an issue.
I boiled the peas for 5-6 minutes then removed it from the heat and added to a food processor with a fair amount of salt, basil, and the juice of one lemon. I pureed it for 5-10 seconds at a time, then would open it up and give it a taste. I ended up having to add a significant amount of salt (1 tbsp maybe?) to get it to my liking, but it wasn’t overly salty or anything. I did have to add some more boiling water because it was super thick. So as I guessed, I probably used too large of a package of peas. I probably tasted 4 times before I decided it was good to go.
By this time the mixture was fairly pureed, but the end result was definitely different looking than the picture in the source recipe. Theirs looked a lot thinner and creamier. Mine had a good amount of texture, but I kind of like it that way. I think if I had pureed it longer and peeled the zucchini and chopped it finer it would have ended up more along the lines of theirs.
Finally I plated it and put a touch of good olive oil on the top. Sorry the final photo is blurry.
I did like this soup – it was very fresh tasting and I could eat it guilt-free, but I would have liked a little “kick”. I thought about grilling some shrimp wrapped in prosciutto to place in the center, but just didn’t feel like taking the time. But I bet the saltiness of the grilled prosciutto would have been a great addition.
