Food of Love – The Football Years Part 2

Part 1 of The Football Years  (6 March) featured pea soup. This edition gets serious, with soya bean curry. The recipe is at the end. After I have explained its significance.

When I stopped playing football, the gap it left in my life felt bigger than I could have expected. I miss it a surprising amount, even all these years after the broken leg brought it to an early end.

Playing the game was about more than ninety minutes exercise on a Sunday morning. It gave me a regular ritual in my life.

In my football years a typical Sunday morning started with a friend turning up at around 9.15 in his van. I would need to be ready to go. This was not as straightforward as it might sound.

It wasn’t just a matter of getting up, getting dressed and having breakfast. There was the frequent discovery that the mud-covered football boots you had thrown into a cupboard after the previous week’s game had mysteriously failed to clean and polish themselves. Not only was the mud still there. If you had left the boots in a plastic bag you also got the bonus of interesting new fungal life forms colonising the damp leather.

Then there was the toilet issue.

Food of Love: The Football Years Part 1

I played football on Sunday mornings for years. During that time I cooked all kinds of high-carb dishes on Saturday evenings. I’m not sure they ever made me run faster. Nor, as it turned out, did they make me stronger. Certainly not in the shin-bone department.

There are a million recipes for pea soup. This is my favourite, whether before playing football or not.

1lb dried green split peas

1½ lbs potatoes

4 pints of low-salt vegetable stock

2 cloves of garlic

4-5 onions

2 large carrots

4 oz butter

Salt, pepper to taste

Soak the split peas overnight in half the stock. Cook in the stock until they are soft (add more liquid if it runs low).

Peel and chop carrots, potatoes and onions. Melt the butter in a (very) large saucepan and fry the vegetables and garlic until softened (5-10 minutes). Add the rest of the stock and cook the vegetables in it.

Mix the vegetables into the peas and cook for a few more minutes. Whizz the whole lot in a liquidizer to the texture you want. Personally, I don’t mind a few lumpy peas left in the mix of my soup.

And here, to go with that winter warmer of a meal, is the story of my last ever game of football.