Split Pea Soup

To me, split pea soup has always looked gross haha there's just no way to dress it up (as you can see from my lovely picture here haha-I'm pretty sure my blog wins least appetizing food pictures ever, but its ok I'm getting a decent camera for Christmas. all is not lost) but it always tastes SO good.

Anyways, pea soup is another perfect recipe for leftover ham, so after I made the Chunky Fleechky I used the ham bone to make the pea soup. Apparently you can also get really cheap ham bones from the Honey Baked Ham Co. stores.

It was my first time making it and I used the crock pot again, but there are ways to make it without one (my mom never made it in a crock pot and hers was always delicious). We got to enjoy ours with some of my boyfriend's aunt's homemade bread- SO GOOD. It's also a relatively cheap recipe depending on how fancy you want to get. Ours was pretty basic and still tasted delicious.

Ingredients:

• Ham bone
• 1 bag of split peas (1 lb)
• Carrots (I used about 9 baby carrots chopped up but you could use 2 large carrots instead)
• Onion (diced)
• 1 or 2 cloves of garlic (minced)
• 2 tsp of dried parsley 
• 1 tbs salt
• 1 tsp ground pepper
• 6 cups of water
• 1 c diced ham (OPTIONAL, I didn't do this, but if your ham bone is really clean you may want to add in some diced ham for more flavor)

Steps: 

1. Rinse peas in a strainer
2. Layer ingredients in your crock pot in this exact order: Peas, ham bone (and diced ham if you want), carrot, onion, garlic, parsely, salt, pepper. Then pour water over the top of all of it. (I checked to make sure the water could get to the bottom of the crock pot so my peas wouldn't burn and stick to it- my crock pot can get pretty hot) DON'T STIR
3. Cover and cook on HIGH for 4-5 hours or LOW for 8-10. You will know it's done because your peas will be very soft and mostly disintegrated and any ham left will be falling off the bone.
4. Turn off heat and pull out the ham bone. I also pull out any chunks of gross fat or bits of bone that have fallen off into the soup. I then pulled any good chunks of ham I could off the bone and chopped them off and re-added them to the soup. 
5. Stir soup and let sit uncovered for 10 mins so it will thicken. 
6. Serve! (Preferably with a side of homemade bread haha)

*Something I also learned, when I refridgerated the leftovers they turned almost jello-like in consistency. I just added a little water and stirred and microwaved and repeated until I got the consistency back to somewhat normal*