Jeez Louise

Soup

Alright, so, if anyone is actually still left reading this after my cinematic endeavours… I will now attempt to bore you to tears with my mad soupmaking skillz!

I mentioned yesterday that I’d baked a ham. Well, although Rob has been putting a dent in it, there is quite a bit of that ham left. I’m not a huge ham fan, and didn’t want to still be eating ham in two weeks, so I decided that I would make at least some of it into a soup. I made my mom’s mom’s split pea and ham soup. Which, although I don’t love ham, I love this soup. And since no one else will eat it (Rob has an aversion to peas, to put it lightly), it’s all mine!!!!!

So… here’s the recipe (sort of).

Take 1 lb (about 1 package, if you get the 450 g. packages, which is what we have here) of dried split peas. I have never seen it done with anything but the yellow ones, but I suppose if you wanted, you could use the green ones. Put them in a bowl and put cold water on them. This is just for cleaning them - because sometimes? They still have like, pebbles and sticks in them. The sticks/pebbles/whatever usually float to the top. I’ve never found any, but it’s how I learned to do things and you never know what might happen. Then strain them out in a colander or whatever.

Next take the peas and put them in a pot. Cover them with about 8 cups of water. Boil it up. I let it get to a boil, then I put it on simmer for like… an hour. Check on it now and then (I set a timer to go off every 10 or so minutes). At some point after the first 10 minutes, I threw in the big honkin’ bone from the ham. If you don’t have a ham bone, you can just put in some cut up ham. After about half an hour the peas should be totally mooshy and actually not look pea-like at all anymore - they’re all just a thick liquid. That is good. Take the ham bone out. Cut the ham off it and put it back in the soup. Give the bone to your dog (or the wiener dog across the street from you). If you like onion and celery and carrots, then dice up some onion and celery and carrot and put them in the soup. Keep it simmering (and keep stirring it every once in awhile) for the next half hour, hour. Put in some pepper. I don’t add salt because ham is salty enough. About halfway through I ended up putting in another 2 cups of water because it was thickening up like crazy.

Then eat it up!

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