Well-researched Pea Soup

Like I blogged a couple of days ago, I got a food processor for my birthday. But there were some other presents that went along with it, one of which deserves a recipe of its own -- The Flavour Thesaurus, by Niki Segnit. Highly recommended! Segnit has looked at 99 different ingredients (from cauliflower to caviar) and tried them in pairs to see what goes well with what. This results in some pretty nice-sounding combinations I've never tried before, so it's a great source of inspiration. The book doesn't include many recipes, so you're pretty much left to your own devices -- in my particular case, a pretty spiffy new device, the food processor! ;-) I'll be honest with you, I was at a boring meeting today and by the end of it all I could think about was how to use my new-acquired flavour knowledge in a recipe. This is the result: a hearty pea soup.

Ingredients (for about 1.5 litres of soup)

2 parsnips
1 medium onion
150 grams of potatoes
750 grams of frozen peas
1 chicken stock cube, dissolved into 500 ml of boiling water to give 500 ml of chicken stock
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
some rashers of streaky bacon to serve

Slice the cleaned parsnips, onions and potatoes thinly and fry them in a large pan with two tablespoons of olive oil. (If they stick to the bottom of the pan, add a few tablespoons of water.) Once the onions have softened, turn down the heat and let these vegetables stew in their own juices for 10 minutes.
Add the stock and season well, then add the frozen peas. Turn the heat up, bring the soup back to the boil, then turn down the heat again. Now let the soup simmer until all the vegetables are easy to pulse in your food processor. (For a more rustic version, you could leave the soup as-is, without pulsing it.)
Fry the rashers of bacon in a hot frying pan until crispy and put them on the soup as croutons when you serve.