Split pea gladness

Split pea has always run a close race with lentil in the race for the title of My Favorite Soup Ever.  I know, I know — here we are in the middle of August, and she’s talking about soup!  But thick, creamy soups like split pea are good comfort food, too, and God knows the need for comfort food can arise any time of the year.  (Plus, if you live in a place like I do where the air conditioning actually makes it unbearably COLD in the summer, you may welcome a hot lunch from time to time.)

It’s not often you find a good, tasty split pea soup that’s also vegan and low-fat.  A lot of restaurant varieties have ham, bacon or even cream added (weird!), and most canned varieties have added oil.  Luckily, when a split pea craving struck me recently, TJ’s had just the (katy-approved) thing: this!

Ingredients: Filtered water, organic green split peas, organic onions, organic celery, organic carrots, sea salt, organic basil, organic garlic, spices, organic cracked black pepper.

Check out those nutritional stats!

Warmed up for a few minutes on the stove, this soup is every bit the comfort food you want it to be; creamy and filling with the perfect mushy texture provided by the peas, carrots (which seem to be pureed in) and cooked celery bits.  I usually don’t even like celery, but there is no identifiable celery taste here — it’s purely for texture. The spices are nothing special, either, but they give the soup just the flavor it needs.

Split pea soup proudly joins hummus in the Hall of Fame for Foods Which Taste Much Better Than They Look

I ate it with a few pretzel bites I picked up from the farmer’s market on Sunday (baby pretzel bread!  my new favorite thing!).  They were the perfect croutons.

Pretzel bread! So hard to find vegan but so worth it when you do!

It’s definitely a simple dish.  So simple, in fact, that what I most wanted to do after tasting it was sit down and figure out a recipe to make it myself!  It seems easy enough and the results would be well worth it.  I love to cook but I’m not intuitively good at it; that is to say, I’m great at following recipes but not so hot at inventing them.  Maybe once I’m back home and into an apartment with an Actual Kitchen, I’ll give it a try.