I did not do a menu plan last week. Early Sunday afternoon, I turned my mind to what to eat for dinner. We go to night church at 5 p.m., so it needs to be something that is quick to cook or can be made ahead of time. For this reason, we often have soup. I decided to roll with soup because it would make good fodder for Julie and Tobia’s Cool Bloggers Autumn Soup Challenge. I do have a list of soups we eat regularly, which I will post at some stage, but I didn’t have all the ingredients to make them. So, my challenge was finding a soup I could make with the very limited contents of my fridge, freezer and pantry. The Tenderheart cookbook came to my rescue, which means the bonus of ticking off another recipe for my Tenderheart cooking challenge. An even bigger bonus—I could tweak it to use the broad beans I decided needed to be harvested. Note that we are in Spring here so this is more a Spring soup.

My first job was to harvest the broad beans. Once I got stuck into this task, I was doubly glad I’d decided to complete the harvest because something had been eating my broad beans. I ended up with a big bowl of broad beans, which was substantially reduced upon podding and again after their second podding.

While I was doing all this, I also got the broken-up linguini, which I substituted for the elbow pasta in the recipe, cooked. I left all that there and headed off to church. It only took about 15 minutes to finish off the soup once I was home.

Pea egg-drop macaroni soup

Recipe here.

The Quick Lowdown:

• Ingredients: elbow or other small pasta (I broke up some linguini I had in the cupboard), roasted sesame oil, ginger, garlic, vegetable stock, eggs, frozen peas (I substituted most of the peas with my broad beans), green onions
• Prep work: Apart from doing the broad beans which is not in the original recipe, you only had to lightly beat the eggs and slice the spring onions
• Dirty dishes: I wiped out the pasta cooking saucepan to make the soup. Saucepan, knife, bowl, colander, cutting board.
• Taste: Good
• Family-friendly: Yes
• Regular rotation worthy: I think so because it was so quick and could be made with pantry/freezer staples. It fed G and I for dinner and two lunches—winning!

What would you make if you hadn’t planned anything and didn’t want to go to the shop?