Slow cooker pea soup
When I decided to experiement with pea soup, I had no idea what kind of ham you put in it. I asked the guy at the store, and he pointed me to a seperate little section of the meat area with a smorgasborg of ham hunks. I decided to experiment -I bought some ham hocks, a pork jowl, and some salt pork. So far, I've made a recipe using the ham hocks, and one using a pork jowl (featured here).
My feedback on ham hocks is that they are fun to try for their super weird primitiveness, but don't have any meat so if you're looking for that don't get this. However, the hocks are loaded with fat and bone and so make the soup taste amazing.
The same is sort of true for the pork jowl. While it looked like it would be meatier, looked like a dense slice of the porks actual jowl (see photo below), it ended up just being really dense drippy fat. We scooped it all out threw it in the trash before we ate, just like we did with the hocks. I wish there was a better thing to do with it -I thought it would be too unhealthy for Wiley.
Maybe the salt pork will have some meat. Will update. We added some sausage to the pea soup if we wanted some meat. Otherwise, for the pork jowl recipe, see here: http://www.wildnourishment.com/2014/03/12/split-pea-soup/. I borrowed from this recipe and made up some of my own.
Ingredients & Directions:
I put a bag of frozen peas, a bunch of chopped carrots, celery, the fried up pork jowl and it looks like a spare ham hock, some springs of thyme, salt and pepper, and parsley in the crock pot and set on high for 4 hours or on low for 8.
When done, take out the chunks of ham hocks and pork howl and toss them, unless you can think of something to do with them. I put all the rest into a blender and blended it up so it was smooth like pea soup.
*With every soup I make, I usually make rosemary bread. See the post on that for the recipe. Its SUPER easy!
Chopping carrots.
Frying the pork jowl before putting it in the crock pot.
Chopping celery -see the Tools post for more about this amazing device.
Pork jowl