Carol’s Finnish Pea Soup with Apples
I posted a bunch last year on Anna Thomas’s Love Soup, a big book of seasonal vegetarian soups. I made tons of the soups from the book back then, but here’s one I hadn’t yet gotten around to. And it’s a delicious one! I love mustard in pea soups, and mustard sure has its role to play here. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of dijon, or more to taste. When I first finished the soup with the basic tablespoon of dijon, the soup tasted surprisingly bland. Oh, geez. So I added one more tablespoon of dijon, and that magical thing happened: the magic that results from what they call “tweaking the seasonings.” All of a sudden, I could taste everything: the toasted ground coriander, the chopped apple, the fresh peas from the campus farmer’s market, the earthy split peas, the smoked salt (that wasn’t from the recipe–I use smoked salt in just about everything these days, thanks to the box of it I brought here from Ontario), the cider vinegar, and of course, the mustard itself! Lesson learned for the millionth time: often, blandness has a shockingly easy and small solution.
