Snow Pea Leaf Soup with Ginger Mint and Roasted Garlic

Try using snow pea leaves in your favorite pea soup

The powdery mildew is claiming more and more of my snow pea plants daily and they just narrowly made it through our first snow fall last night! What I can’t use this weekend I am going to experiment with freezing.  I have been using snow pea leaves in everything this week! This is basically my split pea soup recipe adapted to use snow pea leaves. I would guess, if you didn’t have snow pea leaves, you could substitute with spinach? or use it as the original just increase the split peas to 1½ cups. A quick note about timing start the garlic roasting first, then move on to collecting and desteming the pea leaves, collecting a salad spinner full of pea leaves can be a bit time consuming.

 In a soup pot over med/low heat sauté in olive oil: 1 carrot and 1 shallot, diced.

Once the veggies are tender add:

2 cups Vegetable stock

1 to 2 cups water(depending how soupy you like your soup)

1 small potatoes chopped

½ cup green split peas

4 cups Snow pea leaves, cleaned and destemed(about one salad spinner full)

1 hand full of fresh mint

1 tbl fresh ginger micro grated

4 Cloves roasted garlic skins removed(see below)

½ tsp liquid smoke

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 1½ hours. Puree and serve with a swirl of hot sauce(I like “tuong ot spiracha” hot chili sauce) garnish with a few snow pea flowers. 

Roasted Garlic: Leave garlic in its skin, drizzle with olive oil, wrap in foil (or place in garlic roaster) bake at 375F for 20 mins, uncover and bake for 10 mins more. I used to always roast a full head of garlic, I know some people are superstitious about this. For me it works just fine to only roast a few cloves at a time, make sure to leave the skins on as you break off the number of cloves you require. You can store roasted garlic in the fridge for quite some time but I find the flavor deteriorates after a couple days.