Lunch from the lottie

 A couple of soups with all home grown ingredients.

 Firstly, "A rich root and cheese soup for a winter's day" from Nigel Slater's Tender - parsnip soup to you and me. The parsnips, onions, garlic and chillies were all home grown but I haven't managed to grow my own turmeric yet.

Then I decided it was time to use some of the beans I grew and dried last summer in a minestrone soup of sorts with tomatoes from the freezer, turnips stored in a bucket since November and kale picked freshly this week, with a little dried chill and oregano for flavour

after soaking

Lunch from the Lottie - #10 - with the help of some stock

Two Lottie Lunches this week; the first using tomatoes and broad beans from the freezer with the last of the parsnips







and the second with stock, potatoes, leeks and dried peas.....


Normally after Sunday's big roast I have bones to boil for stock but this week's pork was boneless. All I had left to boil up were some lumps of overcooked hard meat - surprisingly it did look and taste like stock after boiling.

 I remembered this time to do my advance planning  by soaking dried peas overnight. These are home grown and dried and this is the first time for testing them.


After their 10 minute rapid boil, I cooked them in the stock with the, now softened, meat scraps and our potatoes and leeks.

 A really thick pea soup for a cold winter day.

Sorting peas

I decided this year to have a go at growing marrowfat peas with the intention of drying them. The dull and very labour-intensive part is sorting them - into 'nice to eat', 'might be ok' and 'only fit for seed'. I wonder whether anyone growing a larger amount would bother to sort by hand or maybe just do it by a quick check before cooking.

Drying for winter

We seem to have the back porch filled with veg for winter use. It catches the late afternoon sun so can get quite warm in there making it ideal for drying. I don't quite trust the freezer to NOT fail because of power cuts or something so like to  have some of our veg stored in 'old-fashioned' ways.


After a while the onions will be moved into the darkness of the garage....

...and the broad beans and peas podded and jarred. The beans are just normal broad beans left to dry on the plants but the peas are a type, Maro, best suited to drying. I think I may have picked them a little early and not all have dried with a nice green colour - any odd ones can be sown again next year. Some had even started to send out shoots - proves I haven't mastered drying them - and these I've re-sown straight away in a large pot which can be dragged into the greenhouse when the weather drops cooler. I might even have fresh peas for Christmas!