Split-Pea & Cabbage Soup

Feel free to use a regular stock pot for this. I just prefer the Dutch oven since it heats evenly and retains the heat after the burners are off. First add the olive oil and garlic. Let this sauté until fragrant before adding the carrots and potatoes. Cook these over medium heat until you can see that they are beginning to be cooked through.

Dump in the chicken stock, peas, cabbage, and spices and stir. I say 4 cups of stock in the ingredient list, but I found I needed a bit more liquid since some had cooked off while boiling. I added white wine since it was handy and I hate watering down anything, but you can use whatever you want. The liquid probably won’t cover the cabbage, but the cabbage will cook down. Cover the pot and cook at medium low for about an hour. Go play Scrabble with your significant other or watch Man vs. Wild or clean up all the red lentils you spilled on the floor when you were organizing your pantry.

After the hour of cooking, stir well and use this opportunity to throw in a parmesan cheese rind. Doing this with your rinds instead of throwing them away once you grated all you can keeps you from wasting precious flavor. The rind breaks down and with frequent stirring, it will give up bits of cheese throughout the broth. I think I saw this first on thekitchn.com but I know Giada talks about it a lot too (when she’s not showing, in great detail, how to enunciate Italian words). Now I can’t go through parmesan fast enough in pursuit of the leftover rinds. Yum.

This soup is flavorful enough on its own, but with some shredded parmesan or jack cheese (people forget about jack cheese!), it’s even better. I also cooked up some bacon (in oven at 375 degrees for 10 minutes) and tore it up over the soup in an effort to get my boy more on board with the whole “so there are peas in the soup?” routine.