There is a café in Amsterdam called the Café ‘t Smalle (http://www.t-smalle.nl/). It is my favourite café in the city. It’s right by the Anne Frank House, so very convenient for a quick lunch after a morning’s sightseeing. In summer if you go you can sit out on a little pier on the canal and watch the boats go past, but my favourite time to go is in winter. This is because it’s only in winter they’ll serve you the mulled wine and pea and ham soup. This is, quite literally, the best soup in the whole world – flavourful and filling and so thick you can stand a spoon up in it for a full 10 seconds before it falls over – my Dad tried it once! This recipe is nothing like as good as Café t’ Smalle’s soup, but it is delicious, and can be cooked quickly and easily on one ring in under quarter of an hour. Serves 4.

One small bag of frozen peas (it doesn’t matter if they’ve been out for a while and thawed)

Two ham stock cubes, made up with recommended amount of water

One small pack of nice ham

5 spring onions

A splash of milk

A knob of butter

1. Heat the butter in a small saucepan until it is foaming. With a pair of scissors, snip the spring onions into the pan as thinly as possible, leaving out the ends.
2. Fry, stirring with a wooden spoon, until they soften.
3. Add the stock and peas and bring to the boil.
4. Shred the ham into the pan, stir everything well to combine and reduce the heat.
5. Simmer for five minutes
6. Take off the heat. Mash the mixture roughly, using a fork. You want the consistency to be definitely liquid, but not too smooth.
7. Return to the heat, stir and add as much milk as you like depending on how runny you want it.
8. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve with crusty bread.

This soup makes a brilliant late supper, perhaps if you’ve been out to lunch, but is particularly good poured into a thermos and taken on a picnic. As it’s so quick, it’s no hassle to make it before you set off. I would normally say that to make it vegetarian you could leave out the ham, but I do feel it’s nothing like as good without it.

Amsterdam is easily accessible by ferry, especially from Hull. The Relaxing Crow Caravan Park is a reasonable distance from the city centre.

As always, cooking, especially in a caravan, brings dangers, and these should always be insured against with Caravan Insurance.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Caravan, Caravan Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.