With April out of the way, I hope you’ve had your fill of asparagus, crab and wild garlic. If you haven’t, then of course there’s still time but these ingredients are at their best now, so don’t delay.

A crab salad with poached asparagus and bitter watercress would work well for a long, cool evening at the end of spring. The temperature is on the rise so we should be switching to lighter dishes.

What can we expect from May? I’m hoping the Irish peas pop up soon. A little pea and potato soup with some goats curd would be a nice starter for a summer dinner party.

Simmer until soft

For the base, I’d fry some small onions with cubed peeled potatoes. Cover in vegetable stock and simmer until soft. Add the fresh peas for the last minute or so. Remove from the heat and blend with some butter and flat leaf parsley.

This will give the soup a green velvety texture. Pass the soup through a fine sieve and then season with some fine sea salt. Spoon some goats curd into the centre of a warm bowl and pour the soup around the curd.

I love to dress the soup with peas flowers, vetch (wild pea shoots), and some extra virgin rapeseed oil. This soup also works well with sea beet, the wild variety of spinach that grows by the coast.

Recently, English chef Nathan Outlaw cooked a wonderful variation of this soup in Aniar as part of our chef swap. He substituted the peas for spinach. We served it with a grilled langoustine, some Goatsbridge trout roe and finished it with some wild sea radish.

Wonderful experience

The dish was a wonderful experience of the terroir of the west of Ireland, with land and sea coming together to form a perfectly made dish.

The langoustine was caught off the Aran Islands and landed in Rossaveal just two days before. They’re a wonderful prawn and we would do well to eat more of these than their foreign counterparts that are often farmed in dubious circumstances. Wild and local are always my two preferences when searching for seasonal food.