The fabulous chick pea! 15g of protein, 45 g of carbohydrate, 13g of dietary fibre, 4g of good fats and a whole load of minerals per 150g so this soup is a veritable monster of goodness!

Yet again I am trawling through my cookbooks and if you like a soup that you can pretty much stand your soup spoon in and take to work in a wide-necked flask and ensure that you get the very best nutritiously superb lunch, it could well be this one!

I only have one book from the pen of the brilliant Amanda Grant called Lunchbox but it is well-thumbed and I have been making her soups (and best-ever combination of ingredients in her sandwiches on everything from rye to sour dough to foccacias to pittas and the rest) since it arrived in my cookbook collection in 1999.

I haven’t made her Italian Chick Pea Soup for a while but as the weather is a bit nippy right now in Scotland it won’t be long I can assure you! And, even the corner shop has most of the ingredients so it is a no-brainer to pick them up at the end of the day and rustle this soup together in super-quick time…

MINESTRONE SOUP

A really good spoonful added to Minestrone, fantastic on sour dough toast with ripe tomatoes, alongside steamed vegetables or perhaps sneaked into a baked potatoes, stirred through pasta at the very last minute or maybe just spooned straight from the jar - it’s has got to be said - pesto is kind of addictive!

But have you made pesto with oil that is rich in essential fatty acids? An oil that enriches our food while delivering the superb qualities of the much-needed EFA’s for our health and wellbeing and has had no damaging heat treatment at all?

I like Udo’s Oil, 3*6*9 Blend but there are others on the shelves - try avoid the ones in plastic bottles (they tend to be cheaper but they are not so pure).

I am struggling to remember where this pesto recipe came from but I think it had something to do with Udo Erasmus (what a great name!) whilst I was studying nutrition and his ground-breaking research into Omega 3’s BUT I do know it is really good, particularly when it is straight out the blender and slung in a devil-may-care fashion on top of my minestrone soup!