Cooking with Pea & Broad Bean pods

katholicos

silvercharming wrote: »

If you fancy something a bit different there is this recipe for broad bean pod fritters too - really, really tasty!

What a brilliant idea. Thanks for posting the link:)

balmaiden

Well I don't know if anyone else has tried the soup. We have and it was nice but to be honest a lot of faf for a very ordinary soup. Next move will be trying the fritters. Thank you for that link Silvercharming.

Primrose

Yes, the pea pod & the broad bean pod soup does take a little effort. However, these soups are very tasty and really the whole point of the exercise is a challenge to avoid waste and effectively produce something to eat which costs nothing, or practically nothing. This is the first time for many years that I've grown peas in our vegetable patch and they were so tender that I was doubly anxious to get value for money out of them by making peapod soup. We serve ours chilled in wineglasses as an unusual light summer starter.

Larumbelle

Primrose wrote: »

really the whole point of the exercise is a challenge to avoid waste and effectively produce something to eat which costs nothing, or practically nothing.

:T What a brilliant way of summing it up. I've got to be honest, I feel really proud of myself every time I make a useful meal out of what everyday folks would chuck out!

Primrose

silvercharming - I suppose as a child bought up during the last war the sin of wasted food was drilled into me from an early age and I am grateful for that lesson. I'm appalled at the amount of food which some people throw away. I have, on occasions, even saved the scrubbed potato peelings for roast potatoes and put them on top of the roasting potatos to make some "sort of potato crisps".

You're right to feel proud of your efforts. I feel the same when I've produced a meal out of virtually nothing. What's sad though, is that if you were to give those same ingredients to a young person today and say to them "Right, you've got to product a family meal from that" they would have absolutely no idea how to go about it. That's what a generation of ready processed meals, and the abolition of old fashioned Domestic Science lessons have done for us. They say that every generation loses another set of skills as technology advances, and this is certainly true of the skill to produce good old fashioned cheap meals.

ALIBOBSY

We had some from the garden this week and the kids fed the pods to the rabbits who loved them. May try the soup recs on here later on, our rabbits are fab though love veggy peelings etc and give out "stuff" which can go on the old compost heap.
It was kids who wanted them though and in MSE style they were free. Someone at school was gatting rid of 2 rabbits and the hutch. When we went to collect she even threw in a bag of straw, a bag of sawdust and a bag of feed which she had on the go. Bargain and the kids are loving them. Next they and OH want chickens lol.

ali x

Ballymackeonan

I was inspired by his thread to use whole young broad beans, chopped, in a mixed vegetable soup instead of French beans - worked (and was) a treat! It's a good way of using up odds and ends of vegetables - this one was approximately equal quantities of leeks, courgettes, carrots and beans, ½ a leftover pepper, some garlic - all chopped, sweated in olive oil, and then chicken stock, herbs and seasoning added. Mmmmmm!

balmaiden

Primrose, believe you me I am all for moneysaving and certainly believe in putting the effort into my food production and cooking and I can proudly say that as a family our food waste is almost zilch. We grow most of our own veg and eat it fresh or preserve by freezing, drying or bottling. We are also very keen foragers both in the countryside and the seashore.

I agree that peapod soup is delicious, but, broadbean soup, in my opinion, is not worth the effort of laboriously sieving the cooked beanpods for the resulting very ordinary soup. Not to worry though as the beanpods go on to the compost heap, so nothing wasted.

pennypusher

When I was a child we used to take all the broad beans out of the pods and then slice the pods and cook them at the same time as the broad beans and eat them at the same time. You can only do it if the pods aren't too hard but it's lovely and makes the broad beans go further. I can't believe everyone doesn't do that.

balmaiden

I quite agree, pennypusher, when they are young we cook them in their pods and very nice they are to