Nigella Lawson's simple pea and pesto soup needs just five ingredients

05 December 2023 , 13:07

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Nigella Lawson's pea and pesto soup will be a winter favourite. (Stock Photo) (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

This hearty recipe is the perfect winter pick-me-up for cold and dreary days.

There's nothing quite like a nutrient-heavy and satisfying soup in the wintertime to warm you right back up - and help support a healthy immune system to help keep illnesses at bay.

This recipe for pea and pesto soup is a Nigella Lawson classic and brings together rich complementary flavours that create a restaurant-worthy dish that the whole family will love - all while being incredibly simple to make with only five ingredients needed.

This recipe is enough to make two healthy portions of the delicious soup, so simply double up the ingredients - or triple - if you're cooking for more people or want to whip up a batch of it.

Nigella's top tip for this one is to buy fresh pesto rom the refrigerated section of the supermarket, rather than the kind that comes in a jar. "While you can make it with pesto from a jar, the difference when you use the 'fresh' stuff in a tub that you can find in chiller cabinets in the supermarkets is astonishing," the TV chef explains, in a recipe featured in her book Nigella Express.

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Ingredients:

• 375g frozen peas
• 2 spring onions (trimmed)
• ½ tsp fresh lime juice
• 4 tbsps pesto
• 2 tbsps pine nuts (optional)
• 1 tsp sea salt

Kitchen equipment:

• Kettle
• Saucepan
• Blender
• Small frying pan for pine nuts (optional)

First things first, boil a full kettle, then measure out 750ml of water to go in your saucepan and bring it back to the boil. Then grab your frozen peas and add them to the water along with the lime juice, spring onions, and salt, and let it "bubble together" for seven minutes.

Next, get rid of the spring onions, before popping everything else in the pan into your blender - along with the pesto - and give it a good blitz. Nigella explains "I think soup tastes better made in a blender rather than a food processor, and it's best to use a blender which has a central plug in the lid that you can remove to stop the pressure building up — which, in turn, prevents you getting soup all over you or your walls."

Once it's fully liquidised, you simply return it to the pan and warm it back up ready for you to enjoy. If you are going to use pine nuts, at this stage you should toast them in your frying pan on medium heat. Once they are coloured, sprinkle them over the top of your bowl of soup and tuck straight in.

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Emma Mackenzie