Spring Vegetable, Bean and Ham Soup

Yes, I know this is mostly an art/craft focussed blog, but you know what? If I can go from spinning to painting, I can add some cooking too, right?

The following recipe is quite simply what I'm eating this evening - it takes 20 minutes to cook, if that, and there's enough for 4 good-sized portions. It's a really easy recipe and you can adapt it/play with it as much as you like, without much effort. It's not possible to copyright a recipe, but one can copyright the expression thereof, so I'm licensing this as CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International), so that means you can reproduce this version of the recipe with attribution to me. I've included botanical/zoological names to get around things having different names outside of the UK and causing confusion - if you're unsure, look up the Neo-Latin name online and find out what it's called where you live.

Spring Vegetable, Bean and Ham Soup
(Serves 4 as a main meal)
Cost per portion: £2.14 - based on Sainsbury's prices.
1,000mL vegetable stock (I used 500mL pre-prepared stock from Marks and Spencer plus 500mL of water and 1 × Kallø Very Low Salt Organic Stock Cube)
180g new potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.) cut in half or into slices if a bit bigger.
80g garden peas (Pisum sativum L.).
80g broad beans (Vicia faba L.).
400g can of butter beans (Phaseolus lunatus L.), drained and rinsed briefly.
195g can sweetcorn (Zea mays convar. saccharata var. rugosa), drained and rinsed briefly.
Bunch of salad onions (Allium fistulosum L.) with the very tips at either end remove and chopped into 1" pieces, using all of the white and green parts.
25g bunch of flat leaved parsley (Petroselinum crispum var. neapolitanum (Mill.) Fuss), chopped finely, including stalks.
About 100g cooked ham hock (Sus scrofa domesticus Erxleben.) - either the shredded stuff or a mini ham cut into pieces.
Freshly ground pepper - I use Bristol blend personally, which is equal parts by weight of black peppercorns (Piper nigrum L.), white peppercorns (ditto), green peppercorns (ditto), pink peppercorns (Schinus molle L.) and allspice berries (Pimenta dioica (L.) Merr.).

Bring the stock to the boil in a large pan. Add the potatoes and cook for 8 minutes. Add the peas, broad beans, butterbeans and sweetcorn, cook  for 5 minutes. Add the salad onions, cook for 3 minutes. Add the ham and the parsley and stir into the soup and then season with pepper to taste. I like to leave it on the heat for about 1 minute so that the ham warms through slightly - it's cooked over all in just over 16 minutes, which is pretty good!

Potatoes halved - chopping board from Joseph Joseph (ok its the meat one in the set, sue me!) and knife by Taylor's Eye Witness.

Beans, peas and sweetcorn ready to go into the pot. Sieve by Joseph Joseph.

Massacring parsley with my Zyliss herb chopper - really makes it easy work given how easily my wrists dislocate when trying to chop things. 

Finished product - soup bowls from a discontinued range by Le Crueset, flatware by Villeroy and Boch, cardboard stool/table and coasters from Tiger, glass from Bodum. Sour Dough bread from Marks and Spencer.