Split Pea Soup

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my brother made a split pea squash soup. It was delicious, but he inadvertently bought too many split peas so they were left behind for me to use (ha!). Then on Christmas day, I was left with the ham bone which I was already to throw out when MG said "I'll put this in the freezer so you can make split pea soup." (ha!)

I have never made split pea soup, never ordered it in a restaurant or ever really thought it would be a good idea to make split pea soup. Although, now it looked like I was destined to make it because I now had a ham bone in the freezer and a bag of split peas in my cabinet. So I began to look for a recipe in my cookbooks but couldn't find one. I thought that was that. Then Dan opened up his new crockpot which had a recipe book inside. Guess what? There was a recipe for split pea soup and it only took 15 hours to make (please note the sarcasm I am trying to convey)! A day or so later I was having a conversation with my friend KC and somehow we got on the topic of split pea soup. My friend said it was one of her favorite soups so I invited her over for my first ever split pea soup extravaganza. At least I figured someone would enjoy it in case neither Dan, Matthew or I didn't like it. We set a date and then I started calculating when I would need to start the soup in order to eat around 6:00 pm.

Gulp...so at 3:00 am I woke up and put all the ingredients into the crockpot and turned it to low.I managed to fall back to sleep easily and then started my day again at 6:00. By the time I got home from work around 3:00 it was time to take out the ham bone, shred the meat and put the meat and spices into the pot for the final three hours of cooking. So far so good. KC arrived right on time with a bottle of red wine and a loaf of french bread in hand for the extravaganza. She said it looked and smelled good enough to eat, so we did. It was actually quite delicious and I would make it again if I ever have a ham bone and a bag of split peas in my cabinet. The rest of the evening was spent chatting away with KC with lots of laughter in between. She had some unbelievable stories to share and I had a wonderful time. The evening ended when our teenage sons came home from a night out sledding (in the freezing temperatures). They both insisted it wasn't cold. We chatted with the boys about their evening and other teenage topics and finally ended the evening around 10:30. I hope the ride home was uneventful.