A person can develop a bad, bad cold: Split pea soup and soda bread

If you follow me on twitter you'll know this has been a poorly week in Penelope's Pantry. I've been completely wiped out by a virus/ infection that's manifesting itself through recurrent migraines. As you can imagine all thoughts of food and cooking have long gone out of the window, but by Friday I was just starting to feel a bit less like death warmed up. Then M came home from Newcastle. With the same bug/ virus. Now despite the fact that I have no energy, I've turned on Accu Broadway and am cooking my little heart out. I knew we needed some hearty, easily digestable, healing food and so I turned to Nigella.  I knew her recipes wouldn't fail and that I was bound to find something in one of her books that would sound attractive and not require much brainpower. Soup it was.

I've added this to Maison Cupcake's Forever Nigella blog hop for January - be sure to pop over and have a look at all the entries.

Nigella's Split Pea and Frankfurter soup (with a couple of Pantry amendments)

2 cloves garlic
1 celery stick
1 carrot, peeled
1 onion, peeled
500g yellow split peas
1250ml vegetable stock
Pack of frankfurters - I used Waitrose's own brand
1/2 tsp ground mace
3 tablespoons of rapeseed oil

Blitz the vegetables and garlic up in the food processor, and tip into the warmed oil in a large pan
Soften gently, but don't allow to colour
Add the mace, and stir in so it's evenly distributed
Add the split peas and stir in
Add the stock (I just used 4tsp of Marigold veg bouillon in a litre and a quarter of water)
Bring to a gentle boil, pop a lid on your pan and turn the heat down and cook for an hour
I found I needed to add another half a pint of water as my lentils had absorbed all the water making this more like a casserole in consistency than a soup
Add your chopped up frankfurters, then adjust your seasoning to taste (as they're quite salty I found)

At this point I felt that the soup was missing something so added a teaspoon of lazy chilli, once stirred through you don't get a huge kick of chilli but it adds a much needed warming depth. You could equally add fresh chilli at the start but it retained some of it's freshness by not cooking it through.

Serve hot with soda bread.

No Knead Soda Bread, based on this recipe but amended slightly

300g malted grain bread flour
1 pot buttermilk 284ml (isn't that an odd amount?)
1 dsp baking powder
1 tsp sea salt


Preheat your oven as hot as it will go
Put the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix through roughly with clean hands
Add the buttermilk and mix (again, by hand) until you have a soft, pliable dough. I needed all the buttermilk, despite the original recipe stating less, but flour is a moveable feast, so if you don't need it all don't fret, everything just needs to come together.
Dust your worktop and hands lightly with more malted flour, and shape the dough into a round (now, if I can manage this with one arm in plaster anyone can)
Cut two dints in the loaf with either your spatula or a sharp knife

Bake for 20ish minutes - I do this on a pizza stone, as it normally results in a nice crispy bottom for loaves that aren't in a tin. Mine today took about 40 minutes, but that's probably down to having a slightly wetter dough. It's done when you can tap on the bottom and it sounds hollow, and when the top is lightly crusted.

That's our poorly Pantry tea tonight, it'll be served cwtched up on the sofa, under blankets hopefully with a shockingly fabulous film on in the background.