Pea and Ham Soup

Serving: 15

This is probably the easiest recipe of the lot. It gives you a good chance to use up any odds and sods of vegetables that are in the fridge. To achieve the amazing color it’s important that the peas are not cooked too long.

Ingredients

1.5Ib                      Frozen peas

3 large                  Carrot

2                            Onion

1                            Leek

4 sticks                 Celery

4 cloves                 Garlic, crushed

6 pints                   Ham stock, using a good quality cubes works for this

2                            Bay leaf

12 slices               Cured ham

4                            Spring onions

20g                        Oil

Seasoning

Instructions

1. The first job is to prepare the vegetables, wash and peel all the vegetables, finely chop the onion, celery leek and carrot. Don’t worry too much about the size as its going to get blended.
2. In a large thick bottomed pan add the oil, once you have a little heat add the chopped vegetables. Cook down the vegetables without achieving colour, we are trying to extract as much flavour as we can from the vegetable this is going to form the base of the soup.
3. Once the vegetables are soft put in half the cured ham and the garlic, mix in with the vegetables.
4. Next add the stock and the bay leaf, bring to the boil.
5. The last thing is to add the frozen peas, once you add the peas bring to the boil
6. Remove the bay leaf and blitz until smooth.
7. To finish top with some chopped spring onion and some shredded ham.

Notes

This soup can be made suitable for vegetarians if you remove the Ham and ham stock and replace with vegetable stock cubes.

The soup is best made and served and you are looking for the peas soup to be bright green.

Particular attention to seasoning is important with this soup as it will need a good few turns of black pepper.

You could also use bacon in this recipe the bacon would be chopped and added at the beginning with the vegetables, or if you have any bacon cooked it can chopped and added at the end. 

Storage

This will keep for 72 hours in the fridge. This soup will freeze well in zip bags and can be heated from frozen.

Once cooked cool as quickly as possible, this can be done in the pot in a sink of ice-cold water of in a large tray.