A quick and delicious lunchtime soup, pairing the sweetness of parsnips with earthy Split Fava Beans. |
Split fava beans are perfect for lunch in a rush – you can go from staring into the larder blankly to having a meal on the table in half an hour or so. This recipe comes from just such a lunch. There's no need to follow the recipe precisely – it works just fine as a set of general principles and the combination of fava beans and parsnips is a real winner.
The recipe also involves a pressure cooker. If you don’t have one, get one! If you have one at the back of a cupboard get it out and dust it down… and if you feel slightly nervous about the whole idea of cooking at pressure, don’t – the days of wobbly, hissy, possibly explosive cookers are long gone.
You can spend a lot of money on a very fancy pressure cooker – and the more up market models will give you a little more control – but my very basic Prestige has served me well (albeit with a bit of guessing on cooking times now and then). Catherine Phipps in her excellent The Pressure Cooker Cookbook recommends going for a larger volume cooker – 6 or 6.5 ltr if you can, it’ll save money and give you more flexibility in the long run.
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Nick Saltmarsh
Author