ffwd: cheating-on-winter (not)pea soup

I’m not a big fan of peas. I like snow peas, and that’s about it. There are too many other interesting vegetables out there to eat peas.

So, when the cheating-on-winter pea soup was chosen as the last recipe for February, I wasn’t thrilled. But I’ve been trying a lot of other new stuff since joining this little cooking club, so why balk now? I was just going to bite the bullet, use the frozen peas, and see what happened.

Then, reading through the FFwD’s P’s & Q’s thread, one of Doristas (the ever-awesome Mardi) mentioned in passing that she’d used edamame instead. And I thought, Okay, that sounds way better! And I resolved then and there to use edamame too. We love edamame in this house. If you live in Japan for any amount of time, and you don’t develop a taste for edamame, there may be something wrong with you. I miss the fresh stuff. But frozen will do in a pinch.

This is a pretty simply soup. I’ve noticed that many of Dorie’s soup recipes are pretty simple, so I didn’t worry so much about the prep/cook time on this. I also got to try out my new stainless steel saucepans! Yay!

Frozen edamame, romaine lettuce, and vegetable stock. That’s it. (Plus an onion, but obviously, that was a no-go.)

It all gets thrown in a pot and simmered for about ten minutes. That’s all the cooking it needs!

And then things got a little complicated. I decided to use a blender to puree the soup (again, the experience of the Doristas came in handy, as one of them had her immersion blender blow-out on her because of the lettuce). Then I strained it to get a more pleasing texture. The soup still came out kinda lumpy, but by that time, it was nearly 8pm, about an hour past our regular dinner-time. Now I know why I like my immersion blender so much – zip it through everything, and you’re done. None of this blending in batches and straining it stuff. This situation just happened to be an exception. I suppose I would have preferred to take all that time over nearly electrocuting myself with my immersion blender.

Upon reading this recipe the first time, the soup didn’t strike me as particularly hearty or filling. So I decided to serve it with little half sandwiches: Black Forest ham, Havarti cheese, and (for me) a dab of fig jam on homemade bread. While I heated the edamame soup back up on the stove, I stuck the sandwiches under the broiler to heat them up and melt the cheese. The soup was ladled into some glass cups, and to finish it off, I put a dollop of Greek yogurt on top.

Edamame soup with ham & cheese open-faced sandwiches.

Without the sandwiches, this wouldn’t have been all that great of a meal. The idea of the soup was interesting, but I’m not sure the result met the expectation. By itself, the soup would have been really boring. The sandwiches actually improved it some, gave it a nice salty-sweet foil to all its greenery. It probably wasn’t as “springy” as it would have been with the peas, but maybe that was for the best. I could really taste the edamame, and that made it totally worthwhile. It was very mellow soup, and even though it wasn’t perfectly smooth, it was still pleasing to eat.

Even so, it’s definitely not the best soup I’ve ever had, nor is it one I would want to make again. It made for a good component of a meal, but it’s not great enough to warrant a repeat performance. An interesting idea that lost something in the execution. But it was nice to try, and it did go really well with the sandwiches. We wouldn’t have wanted the sandwiches by themselves, but with the soup, they were a good pairing.

So: decent, but probably not going to be a repeat. Can’t complain about that!

This was a well-received soup among the Doristas. To see their lovely spring-green soups, check out the links. Happy cooking!