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!

Homegrown, homemade minestrone

 Coming back wet and cold from the allotment, I decided soup was the best thing for lunch - and with one bag full of broad beans and another of peas, thought it best to use at least some of them.

I wasn't quite sure what I was making at the start - I podded some broad beans and started cooking them, then added some of last year's tomatoes from the freezer. I wondered about making chilli at this point so added a couple of my dried chillies and a small courgette - from the polytunnel at the allotment. Then thought about the peas and kale I'd brought home so added them instead and called it minestrone.

Normally I'd add carrots but I'd decided by this point to only use my homegrown produce, though I did add some chopped up leaves from shop-bought celery.

Unfortunately, hubby was late back for lunch and the kale overboiled a bit and looked bedraggled - still, it tasted lovely!