Allotment Soup

It's hard to go wrong with soup. Chop it up, season it up, heat it up, blend it up. Job done. Soup. 

It's even harder to go wrong when you're using your own allotment-grown ingredients. Anybody who's ever grown their own food, and experienced the sensory privilege that is eating it within hours - moments even - of picking, will tell you that nothing you can buy in the shops compares. I don't know if there's any actual scientific evidence for this, but it's a fact.

Ingredients. 

Today I harvested onions, peas, and curly kale. Most soups are onion-based and usually contain something green. Peas are green, and so is kale. Therefore, pea and kale soup. I didn't want to imply that I was making pea soup, though, which is a whole other thing, so I'm just calling this allotment soup. Allotment Soup Number One. There will be others. 

First, I chopped two of the larger onions (one white, one red) and sweated these down in a generous splash of vegetable oil. 

Next I added some garlic and some herbs (lemon thyme, vulgar thyme, and sage) - previously harvested and in the herbs' case, dried. 

As I was doing this, I rememebered reading how the brine from something pickled or fermented can be added to a soup for some extra kick, so I cracked open a recently completed jar of lacto-fermented pea pods, and tipped some in. As liquids bubbled and mixed, a vibrant smell was released. I win at soup. 

All that remained was to add the peas and kale, and let the whole thing boil and simmer. So that's what I did. 

Something else came to mind as I was shelling the peas. If immature pea pods can be fermented, that is, before the peas have formed, why can't the shells once mature peas have been removed and souped? Seems wrong to just dump all that good green matter on the compost. So I rinsed them off, and with the kale stems from which I'd pulled the leaves for the soup, I set them to one side for further lacto-experimentation. 

15 minutes later, or thereabouts, I took the pan off the heat, and blended.

And there it is. Green, tingly, leafy, allotment-y soup. A healthy bowl of happiness. 

A recent allotment video:

Related posts

A Soup Made of Scraps
Another Soup Made of Scraps
Never-Ending Soup
Give Lacto-Fermented Peas a Chance

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