Split Pea Soup Recipe

In turned chilly today in Toronto, we have been blessed with an unseasonably warm winter so far (that jinx there is probably enough to make it drop to -40!) So I decided to make a batch of Split Pea Soup, which seems to be a Canadian staple. Rather than use a traditional recipe I pretty much made it up as I went along, which is the beauty of soup I think.

Ingredients:

• a few slices of prosciutto and canadian peameal bacon
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1/2 white onion
• a few stalks of celery
• 2 medium carrots
• 1 potato
• small crown of brocolli
• handful of baby spinach
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 cup dried split green peas
• 5 cups water/homemade chicken stock
• 1 tbspn extra virgin olive oil
• sea salt to taste

Start by heating the olive oil, then stir in the chopped onions, garlic until soften - about 2 minutes.  Then add chopped carrots, celery and potatoes, cook for another few minutes before adding the split peas, bay leaf and stock.

The soup will need to cook for between 20-30 mins.  Add the brocolli and spinach cook for a further 5-8 mins. I then pureed the soup with a hand blender, leaving it a little chunky. Now is a good time to taste the soup to see if it needs any more salt.

A really nice idea would be to finish the soup off with lemon zest, olive oil and a pinch of smoked paprika. (I got this idea from a great website called www.101cookbooks.com).

It tasted delicious and is pretty damn healthy too, also super easy to make this a vegetarian meal.  Next time I might make some swedish limpa bread shown in Natasha's blog to compliment it.