Soup, glorious soup

Every month, Gourmet Traveller has a section called Fare Exchange, where readers write in to request recipes of dishes they have eaten at a restaurant (Fare Exchange - geddit?  Because it's food, so it's fare, but it's fair - oh, nevermind).

The recipe we tried out last night was from this section, and it is Church St Enoteca's green pea soup with parmesan marshmallows.

This is how it looks in Gourmet:

And this is how it looked at our house:

We're missing the fiddly bits on top because we didn't have some of them, and after 2 1/2 hours of being in the kitchen (to make bread, soup and those parmesan marshmallows) I just couldn't be bothered with the bits we did have.  

The bubbles are there partly because we were celebrating - Tony was officially offered a job at UC - and partly because after 2 1/2 hours in the kitchen making bread, soup and those parmesan marshmallows they were deserved!

I should point out, the recipe suggests the prep and cooking time for this dish is 35 minutes all up, not including chilling of the marshmallows.  The recipe is wrong.  I'm not an overly slow cook, and I find all those estimations of time to be wrong, wrong, wrong.  I'm sure they work in a professional kitchen where all the fiddly bits are done ahead of time, and you have a dishwasher (both the person and the machine - we lack the machine and sadly the person as well) as well as staff to help out.  When it's just me in our tiny galley kitchen, cooking while Tony is doing the bed-boy-wrangling - well, things take longer.  Often a lot longer.

The parmesan marshmallows were fun to make, but I think they are a good example of something that is neat in a restaurant setting, but for a home cook the time-effort-result equation just doesn't work out.  

The soup however - the soup was magnificent.  Clean, fresh and yet incredibly rich and flavoursome.  The only problem I had was it needed to be strained to acheive the light end result, which meant a lot of the pea mush that cooked in all the good stock and butter and so on was going to be discarded.  How wasteful, I thought.

And then I looked at the green pea mush.  Hang on... peas.  Mush.  Soft.  Cooked vegetables.

That looks like baby food to me!  

 

And as it turned out, Toby agreed.

So we all ate Church St Enoteca's green pea soup, in one form or another, and all enjoyed it very much.