Pea and Pesto Soup, twice

The one thing I was really up against when I started this soup project was seasonality. Soup is essentially a winter food, nobody wants to eat hot soup in July, but that exactly the time when the most ubiquitous soup ingredients are in season. Tomatoes, peppers and most of all peas, are at their best in the summer and I refuse to buy them in the winter, so when I was looking through my cookbook collection to select the soups I was going to make I immediately disqualified the recipes that called for those ingredients.
Oh my God, it's so hard to stop yourself to from buying fresh tomatoes, it's not until you make a point of avoiding them that you realize that they are in all of your favorite food (I'm allowing myself canned tomatoes because logically they are usually manufactured in the summer when tomatoes are cheap and plentiful). I love that supermarkets list the country of origin to make it easy for you to feel guilty about shopping, but once you make a commitment to eat locally and seasonally it's hard to ignore them. 'You're just finding another thing to be neurotic about' says the boyfriend, and little crossly. Too late, we're engaged now so he can't escape.

So this recipe is pea and pesto soup, but it's allowed under my amazing rules because Nigella Lawson specifies using frozen peas and premade pesto 'from the fridge section of the supermarket'. You are allowed to use jarred pesto, but there is a slight undercurrent of judgement about doing so.
For a recipe that calls for all of 4 ingredients I had to make a surprising amount of trips to the shops, peas and spring onions were easy enough to find, but the 'fresh' pesto eluded me at two Sainsbury's and one Asda. Very annoying, and very surprising given how easy pesto is to make . In the end I made the soup on two consecutive nights to compare how the abhorrent jarred pesto measures up to freshly made.

Night One:
I think I used an own brand jar of pesto (has anybody noticed that I've stopped taking a photo of all of my ingredients? You'll just have to trust me that this is pea soup), but this is barely a recipe. You boil some peas and spring onions in water with a few drops of lime juice and a couple of spoons of pesto for 7 minutes, puree and eat. This leaves you with a barely juiced lime that now needs to be employed in some other way and less than half a jar of pesto that will probably sit in the fridge until it gets mouldy and I get to throw it away.
The result is fairly nice, fresh and surprisingly flavourful for a soup made on a water base, but I didn't taste the spring onion's and lime's contribution at all. And Linda Blair comes to mind, which is a mark against this soup.

Night Two:
I made the pesto recipe at the beginning of Silver Spoon, it took all of 2 minutes to grind together the basil, oil, cheese and pine nuts (no garlic in this version) which mad me wonder why Nigella would deem fresh pesto a shortcut worth taking. About half of the resultant mixture went in the soup and the result was a lighter, greener looking puree that tasted a lot of peas and not at all of pesto.
If only Nigella had suggested garnishing your soup with a big dollop of your freshly made pesto. The result is a gloriously savory soup with subtle fresh flavors of basil, cheese and olive oil, the peas lift this with their sweetness and you get a very satisfying, simple soup.
There is no comparison between using fresh and bought pesto, but if all you have in the house is frozen peas and a jar of pesto it's still possible to have a nice dinner in under 10 minutes. But lets face reality, if that was really all you had in the house, you'd go out instead.