It is almost Winter here, and already the weather’s freezing. Last week, we bought a leg of ham from Aldi for only $25, and amazingly it has been really lovely ham, despite being half the price we’d normally pay at a larger supermarket or butcher. We’ve enjoyed having it sliced into ham steaks with eggs and sliced for sandwiches. But now it’s whittled down a bit, we wanted to make sure there was enough meat left on to make my favourite pea and ham soup.

My fiance has been nagging me and nagging me to blog about this, but I thought, ‘everyone knows how to make pea and ham soup, don’t they?’ But then I remembered last year, describing it to my Greek girlfriend on  the  phone, and she’d never heard of it, let alone tried it. So, I’ve succumbed to my fiance’s pressure, and here it is in all its yummy glory. Perfect for a chilly evening dinner.

Have I mentioned my three year old son has an aversion to meat? Whilst he is outgrowing some of his dinner time battles, it can still be a challenge to ensure he gets everything he needs at dinner time. I told him I was making this soup today, and he begged me to let him help. I know Missy 9 would’ve loved this activity and could’ve learnt a lot about the peeling and chopping of veges, but alas, she was at school, and it had to be put on early. It was a treat for her to arrive home hungry to the smell of hot pea and ham soup cooking, though!

At this point, I should mention we are currently stove-less and oven-less. We’ve decided in the next month or two, we’ll buy a new stove/oven. We originally only had a stove, but the gas bottle ran out (gas isn’t billed out this way, we buy bottles) and we couldn’t justify buying a refill if we only plan to use it for a month or so. We prefer electric, so that’s what the new model will be. Anyway, this is why this soup was cooked in the crock pot (or slow cooker, whichever you prefer to call it). It was great, it meant my son could stand safely on a chair with the crock pot turned off, and help out.

We were a great little team; I chopped veges and he put the ingredients in. So, for your pleasure, my son will walk you through the recipe:

As you can see, we left a lot of meat on the bone for this soup. You can buy ham hocks without having to buy a whole leg of ham like this, but we find with our family of five, there’s not usually enough meat for everyone to really have a good helping, so I now prefer using our leg of ham at the end of the slicing stage. Pop it in…

We add a whole bag of dried, green split peas (also known as blue boilers)

If you cook this for long enough, the peas just fall apart and become part of the liquid. It also makes it really yummy and thick.

Next, I chopped the vegetables and my son added them to the pot. This batch included: potato, carrots, onion, celery and parsnip. My father (who got me hooked on this soup as a child) believes that a soup is not a soup unless it always has an onion and some celery in it. I’ve made pumpkin soup without it, so I’m not quite as fussy! But, I always aim to  get it into this soup, because it does give the flavour I like.

My father, since I was nine, also used to get me to chop all the veges for our soups on a Sunday afternoon. He taught me about ‘cook’s privilege’, which means you get to sample the food as you go. I didn’t have to tell my son about this concept twice!

Here he is, nicking carrot and celery straight from the pot… Next, all there was to do was to cover it with water, put the lid on and turn it up high.

Usually for slow cooker meals, it’s great to be able to simmer them on low all day, but I find with this soup, I have to crank it up high, or it’ll take forever to boil. Or that could be just my slow cooker, I’m sure different models would vary. We put this soup on a little before lunch….

Dinner time!! It was a meal that my son enjoyed, and not only did he eat all his meat, and everything else, he came back for seconds! He’s so proud that he ‘made it himself’. (My cutting the veges is a mere technicality that we don’t dwell on)

A quick note before I go: my facebook ‘like’ page is down at the moment, it’s a long story… The lovely Violet Le Beaux had the misfortune of having one of her beautiful nail art photos stolen and used by a nail salon’s ‘like’ page at facebook. They cropped off her watermark and plastered their own watermark over it and tried to pass it off as their own work. A number of us reported this copyright breech and made some comments on the ‘like’ page because we were outraged. It turns out that a number of their photos look to be stolen. I made four comments on the ‘like’ page: one in the review section, one as a comment where they displayed her photo, and two on the main wall (I initially only intended one comment, but as an afterthought, went back to post a link to where Violet’s original photo was on her blog). So, for now, my facebook account, including the Hear Mum Roar ‘like’ page,   is disabled. I am appealing the decision, and hope to have it back soon.

It is embarassing to have this happen when I have 102 members on the ‘like’ page thus far, and was looking forward to growing that membership, and I do hope it doesn’t reflect badly on me as a blogger. I feel very strongly about copyright breeches, plagiarism, heck, theft of any kind! I hate thieves, especially when they steal from bloggers such as Violet who are brimming with creative energy, raw talent and a strong work ethic. It’s lazy and unprofessional. Prior to this, I had never had any complaints/warnings/reports from anyone for bad behaviour on facebook, so I hope that helps my case somewhat. I’m not saying this from a ‘woe is me’ angle, just a brief explanation for those who were using the page, or about to sign up. I feel it’s a courtesy to you to explain where it is.

I’m sure it will be back very soon, and it’ll be onwards and upwards!