World Cup Food Challenge, Erwtensoep & Poffertjes, Holland

That's all folks, over for another 4 years. You were magnificent Brazil 2014.

There was the great; Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Deutschland!
The good; So close, Holland.
The bad; Yes England, I'm referring to you
The utter hilarious: The Brazil National Football Team'.

But as the World Cup ends, so does its food challenge and no matter how late I am to finish up, finish up it must.

I've moaned about Dutch food before and the final two recipes in this challenge are hardly the most inspiring but Dutch food is hardly going to set the world on fire. I am off to the Netherlands in 3 weeks and I don't hold out much hope of finding much decent Dutch food.

So to wrap up the challenge I decided to make Erwtensoep (Split Pea Soup) and Poffertjes, which are the Dutch equivalent of our drop scones in the way they are cooked in order to 'puff' them up.however these are proved with yeast which gives them a deeper flavour and well worth giving them ago.

The soup speaks for itself, a simple vegetable soup made with split peas flavoured with, traditionally, smoked sausage. I made a few tweaks to it by using garden peas to give a fresher flavour and because I couldn't find any split peas, I also swapped the sausage in favour of a few nice butchers sausages.

Erwtensoep
500g frozen peas
2 small potatoes, cubed
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 sticks of celery, diced
1 bay leaf
1 litre of veg stock
4 pork sausages, I used Lincolnshire

Bake your sausages at 200C on a baking sheet until fully cooked
Fry the onion until soft and golden then add the celery and carrot, fry for a further 5 minutes.
Add the potato, bay leaf and veg stock. season and leave to bubble until all veg is soft.
pour in the peas and bring to the boil.
Blend to your required consistency.
Slice up the cooked sausages
Return to the pan and stir in the sausages.
Serve

Poffertjes

Recipe available here

Enjoy