Courgette and Pea Soup (Family Dinner Style)

Soup is possibly one of the easiest things I can think of to make and coming into winter and long cold nights, I figured the perfect way to kill boredom on a day off was to make family dinner. This involves an incredible amount of food for five girls, lots and lots of wine and of course, Annie's Cuban rum to get cracked out at about four in the morning!

So, how did I decide on pea and courgette? I looked in my fridge, saw we had two courgettes and what house doesn't have a bag of frozen peas in the bottom of the freezer somewhere! So lets get started.

Soundtrack

Before anything, what I think is most important to cooking is the soundtrack. Whether it is a favourite band, the chatter of your family or just simply your own thoughts, its always nice to document!

For Courgette and Pea Soup, I listened to Hozier's EP called Take Me to Church. When I say I replayed and replayed and REPLAYED I'm not lying. Great things to come from this man, for sure! 

Ingredients

Two Courgettes, any size

• About 300gs of frozen peas
• An onion, or in my case, two left over halves from previous nights cooking
• One clove of garlic (or two, if you are like my friends and obsessed with it)
• Some olive oil (extra virgin by default for my taste)
• A vegtable stock cube

1. So step number one is to cut up all your onions into little pieces while trying to not do the same to your fingers. For this, size isn't a huge issue as everything will be blended up together later. Likewise with the garlic, unequal size is fine! Don't worry if you garlic slips out of your hands and onto the ground outside. Nobody's perfect, give that bad boy a wash and get chopping! (Personal experience)
2. Next put your pot on medium heat  (on an electric cooker, I tend to go for a good four) and pour a nice amount of oil in. I always text my oil by putting a small piece of onion or garlic in and using that as my judge as to when to put everything else in.
3. Fry your onions and garlic til soft. This should smell pretty damm amazing.
4. Cut up your courgettes into quaters, while admiring the fact that I'm colouring coding my chopping boards. (We have one, green for veg, green for fish, green for meat.    Very health and safety concious!) 
5. Throw the courgette quaters into the pot with the nicely coloured onions. Mix it around a bit and wait for the courgettes to become soft. 
6. Now is a great time to own a measuring jug. If, like me, you still haven't bought one, use your kettle! Measuring out 600mls of water and boil that up. (just a bit over the .5 litre part) 
7. Pop your stock cube into a mug while waiting for kettle to boil and stir up your cooking pot
8. Pour your boiling water into your mug. Something I learnt while doing this was to always make sure to check the mug is big enough BEFORE you start to pour in the boiling water! It's the little things that help! 
9. Pour your peas into the pot and follow straight up with the water with the melted stock cube in.
10. Bring this up to the boil and then let simmer for about ten or fifteen minutes.Taste and then season as much as you think needed, but a good bit of cracked black pepper always helps! 

Its then time to make friends with your blender. Now here at home we have two, a Smoothie Maker type blender that I've had for years or a new Handheld one. Now recently myself and the Smoothie Maker had a bit of a row while making beetroot hummus and have been finding pink chickpeas all over the kitchen since then. So I went with the Handheld this time. However, word of warning, soup is HOT. Blending hot soup with a Handheld will end up in some splashing. And burning. And wishing you went with the old friend Smoothie Maker.

And that's it! I toasted some gluten free wraps that I had cut up into squares under the grill and used these as croutons and then a bit of goats cheese for those of us who can have dairy (sorry Annie!) and TA DA! 

Finished product, complete with instagram filter, thanks to Guapa, the Spanish. 

So that's literally it. As easy as wel... Soup!