Thursday, March 31, 2005
Pea Soup
I’ve been meaning to mention that I made pea soup out of the Easter ham bone. First time ever, without following a recipe…
It’s better than my grandmother’s.
It’s probably the best pea soup I have ever had.
How do I do that! It’s as if I missed my calling. When Deb tasted it she said I had a talent. But then, she knew that already.
Basically it was the bone with more meat than necessary still on it, boiled in a full crockpot (16 cups of water or near it) for a couple hours, more meat added, peas added, meat trimmed off the bone and bone eventually removed, plenty of black pepper, a couple or few dashes of onion powder, a small dash of celery salt, and cooking a couple more hours (it was probably 5 - 6 in all).
It’s also the meatiest pea soup I have seen. I could have stripped more off the bone before sacrificing it to the soup pot, not added extra, and still had what would be considered a meaty soup. I rather like it this way. It’s thick, too. Once it sat in the fridge overnight, even when microwaved you could eat it with a fork and not miss much of it.
I’m thinking I should try making a variant of it that can be done without having a leftover ham bone, in smaller quantity, and formalize a recipe. Seeing how cheap the peas were reinforced my increasing belief that I could have eaten even cheaper - or as cheaply with more variety - when I was single, with more scratch cooking of the sort that’s more fun to do for multiple people.
I use celery salt in many things, usually in small amounts, and have converted Deb to experimenting with it. It just seemed right in the pea soup. Most of the flavor came from the smoky meat, but perhaps the pepper, celery and onion enhanced it.