i heart cooking clubs ~ yellow split pea and frankfurter soup

This is my first post for a new cooking group I joined recently, I Heart Cooking Clubs. This group will concentrate on one cookbook author for six months giving the participants an opportunity to stretch themselves and cook outside the box of their old standbys. For the next few months we are working with the recipes of that chipper Brit, Nigella Lawson. I have watched her on the Food Network and read a few of her cookbooks but I have not really cooked any of her recipes, until now.


Each week I will cook a recipe of my choosing that I feel expresses that weeks theme. This weeks theme is Resolutions. So I chose to cook Yellow Split Pea and Frankfurter Soup from Nigella's Feast:Food to Celebrate Life cookbook. I chose it because it is absolutely freezing here in Northern Virgina and I wanted a hot bowl of soup to warm everyone up. I also had all the ingredients on hand so it fit into my Pantry Challenge as well.

I kept the texture a little more chunky than Nigella does because my guys like a hearty chunky soup compared to super smooth. It had a nice weight to it and was very mild in flavor. It was my first time cooking with yellow split peas and I have to say they don't taste any different than the green ones. I was really pleased with the outcome. I served it with a slick slice of warm whole wheat bread. It was just what we needed, healthy, filling and hot.

Check out some other recipes from Nigella over at I Heart Cooking Clubs. you won't be disappointed.
Bon Appetite!
Mary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nigella Lawson's
Yellow Split Pea and Frankfurter Soup

Ingredients
1 onion
1 carrot
1 garlic clove
1 stick celery
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon mace
2 1/4 cups yellow split peas
5 cups vegetable stock or chicken stock
2 bay leaves
8 frankfurters

Directions
Peel the onion, carrot and garlic and cut the onion and carrot into rough chunks. Put them all, along with the roughly cut up stick of celery into the bowl of a food processor. Blitz till all are finely chopped.

Spoon the oil into a heavy-based wide saucepan and put on medium heat. When warm, add the chopped vegetables from the processor and cook for 5-10 minutes, until soft but not colored.

the ground mace-give a good stir and then add the split peas and stir again until their are glossily mixed with the oil-slicked, cooked-down vegetables. Pour over 5 cups stock and add the bay leaves, then bring to a boil. Cover, turn down the heat and cook for about an hour until everything is tender and sludgy, adding more stock as needed. Sometimes the peas seem to thicken too much before they actually cook and need to be watered down. Taste for seasoning once everything's ready.

You can add the frankfurters as you wish. It's probably easiest just to cut them into slices - I tend to add them in chunks of about and inch each - and throw them into the soup warm, but I just put them in the microwave (40 seconds on high is about right for one or two franks) then slice them hot and add them to each person's bowl as they come. Not an elegant soup, I'll admit, but a near-perfect one.

Labels: