Kari at Bite-Sized Thoughts posted a recipe yesterday for split pea soup with caraway seeds. It looked gorgeous and warming and wintry, and I did have split peas needing to be used up, so I decided that would be lunch today.
Only then I woke up very late, and letting a soup simmer for an hour didn’t seem like a good way to get lunch on the table at, well, lunchtime. And then I realised I didn’t have caraway seeds or cabbage. No worries – I have a pressure cooker!
Also, I wasn’t dressed yet, which meant that Andrew would be the one doing the shopping, and he hates cabbage. I can sneak it into things and he will eat it (even if he knows it’s there), but blatantly making him go out and buy it seemed a bit unnecessarily confronting. So I started thinking about what I could put in instead, and whether I even wanted caraway seeds, really (I mostly don’t like them, except when I do), and then I needed to look up how long split peas needed in a pressure cooker, and Lorna Sass had a recipe for split pea soup with sweet potato and apples, and I had apples to use up, and then I thought, really, split peas are my favourite kind of dal, and I also have all these Indian spice mixes and…
… well, basically, it was suddenly a very different soup. Almost a stew, actually. Also, it makes enough for 6-8 people, so lunch for the next few days is basically sorted. Also, it’s really, really satisfying and good, especially in this chilly weather. Not bad for something that cooks in twenty minutes…
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1 tablespoon of butter or sunflower oil 2 small onions 3 celery sticks 2 cups yellow split peas 4 cups water 2 cups stock, any kind that appeals (you can use a couple of extra cups at the end to thin the soup, but don’t use them for the main part of cooking if you are using a pressure cooker, as split peas can misbehave if their level is too high) 1 big sweet potato – about 650g 1 apple 1 tsp mint 1-2 tsp tandoori masala spice blend pinch of salt and pepper 1 cauliflower 2-3 tbsp sunflower or canola oil 1 tbsp panch poron spice mix 1/4 tsp chilli flakes
I was going to call this ‘Middle Eastern-inspired Breakfast Granola’, but let’s face it, the closest I’ve been to the Middle East is in fact the local Turkish shops (of which, admittedly, there are quite a few). On the other hand, I live in an area where the supermarkets routinely stock pomegranates and rosewater and Persian feta, so there’s certainly something in the idea…
So, what’s a macarön, I hear you ask? Well, a macaron is a shiny, posh, filled biscuity thing made of egg-whites and almond meal and currently very much in vogue, and a macaroon is a rough, rustic, old-fashioned biscuity thing made of egg-whites and coconut. This is a rustic but shapely, semi-filled biscuity thing made from egg-whites and almond meal, and thus neither fish, flesh or fowl. Which, actually, is good, because who wants fish, flesh or fowl biscuits? Let alone foul biscuits. That would be no good at all. Anyway, it’s a macarön, because it falls somewhere between the macaron and the macaroon and therefore deserves it’s own name.
