Tag Archives: salt

Two soups – beetroot and pea

Two soups, pea and beetroot

This two-soup soup was unplanned, a happy result of making pea soup one day, and beetroot soup the next.

Full of fibre and nutrients, it has (unusual for me) no oil or butter. Here is how I did it, food fans.

First, the pea soup. I took 200g of dried split organic peas and covered them with twice their volume with water. Then I added an onion pierced with a few cloves (thank you, queen of vegetarian cooking, Rose Elliot).

Then I cooked it for 40 minutes with a level teaspoon of untreated rock salt. And that’s it! I did not even need to blend because the obedient peas went mushy all by themselves.

As for the beetroot soup, I peeled two of the violent purple things and cut them into cubes (be careful of staining!). Thinks: as the beetroot were organic, did I need to peel? Must experiment with unpeeled next time as do not wish to shortchange myself of extra vitamins oft found in the skin.

Then I added a handful of split red lentils to thicken the soup in an innocuous way. Water to cover (about two mugsful). Plus one level teaspoon of rock salt (Do see the comments here where medical herbalist Elena Renier and I talk salt).

Still on the subject of salt: who needs a silly stock cube? Its main taste comes from salt. So why not bypass the unecessary cube – with all its weird additives – and just add a level teaspoon of sea salt instead?

The lentils and beetroot took half-an-hour to become tender to my teeth. I gave them a helping hand with my power tool, the hand-held blender. This is one kitchen device I would not be without.

Thank you, universe, for letting me have easy access to electricity, unlike the global majority. I am sure there is enough to go round if we could share resources more equally. More fairness please!