Soup is Super and Supper

One of the reasons for relative good health I’ve enjoyed I believe can be credited to homemade soup. Especially during the cooler months, there is always soup of some variety either on the stove or in the refrigerator once the quantity gets down to the size that makes keeping it on the back porch no longer necessary (my soup pot is about 12 quarts). Soup is good and generally good for you and can be made from most anything edible. Some of my better ones can never be repeated because the ingredients were whatever happened to be left over.

I usually make soup for a monthly staff meeting at church where I volunteer as growth group coordinator. Most times, the soup gets an appreciative response or at least a “Thank you”. This last month however was obviously a winner when a request was made for the recipe. Hesitantly, I share the recipe for “Killer Split-pea and Ham”. I say hesitantly because sharing recipes especially when the measurements are less than exact, can cause strained relationships. There was an old Ann Landers column that highlighted the problem with a poem.  It began:

            I didn’t have potatoes

            So I used a cup of rice.

            I didn’t have paprika,

            So I used some other spice.

There was more. But you get the idea. The recipe follower was angry that the dish they had hoped to recreate was nothing like the original and accused the recipe giver of being dishonest about the ingredients.

In any event this is one of my favorites:

            Ingredients:

            1 meaty ham bone

            2 one pound bags split peas

`           1 large onion diced

            Several cloves of garlic (never have felt the need to hold back here)

            (secret ingredient alert) Half a rutabaga peeled and diced

            Salt 1-1/2 tablespoon and Pepper 1 teaspoon

            Water enough to cover all ingredients and nearly fill a 12 qt. pot.

Bring the whole mess to a boil and reduce to simmer. After about an hour pull out the ham bone and set aside to trim off the meat when cooled. Allow the rest to simmer until all ingredients are well softened. Use an immersion blender to puree all the stuff in the pot. (If you do not have an immersion blender, this is reason enough to get one.) Chop the trimmed off meat and add to the pot bringing it all back to the boiling point. Adjust salt and pepper. (Do they make non-adjustable salt and pepper?)

Like I said, this was good enough for a recipe request. Hopefully you have a good time with it. That brings me to another issue. A fellow teacher and I lunched together most of the years I was teaching, and lunch usually included soup. We made up a term that we used to judge a soup characteristic called the flatulegentic scale. On a scale of 1 to 10 we guessed the likelihood that the soup in question would cause flatulence in the partaker. A soup with a rating of 1 meant that virtually no one would know you had it. A soup with a rating of 10 probably meant our wives would ask us to sleep on the couch. Although it is hardly scientific, I would rate the above around an 8. Forewarned is forearmed.