I've never made Ham and Pea soup before today. I remember my mum making it when I was younger, but it was never really my thing. But tonight just seemed the right combination of a rainy, chilly, wintery evening... and we had some leftover jalapeño cornbread!

Well, it was so good I completely forgot to even take photos. I did it all in our pressure cooker, so the meal was ready in about half an hour. Here's what I did:

Ingredients

Primary Aromatics

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 5 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 shallot, diced (or just use a bigger onion)

Secondary Aromatics

• 2 carrots, chopped about 1cm square ish
• 2 celery sticks, chopped about 1cm square ish
• 2 bay leaves
• decent pinch of dried parsley

Body

• a bacon hock, circa 800g
• 500g bag of dried split peas
• 1/2c red lentils
• 2.5tsp Vegeta vegetable stock powder
• about 6 cups boiling water

Method

1. Start by putting the peas in the pressure cooker pot, and soaking them in fairly hot water. Then start your prep.
2. Once the veggies are prepped, drain the peas and set them aside. Rinse the pot, and put it on the stovetop on high.
3. Add your primary aromatics and fry for 5 minutes, then add the secondary aromatics and fry another 10 minutes.
4. Remove from stovetop, and put the inner into the pressure cooker body.
5. Add the peas and lentils to the pot, sprinkle in the vegetable stock, and mix it all together.
6. Create a depression in the mix, and place the bacon hock in, so it's as low in the pot as possible.
7. Fill with boiling water until covered, and try to stir it a bit without lifting the hock too much.
8. Put on lid, and pressure cook for 30 minutes.

That's about it! After that it was just a matter of chopping the meat off the hock, stirring it in, and potentially adding a little more water.

It would have been far easier to use a boneless lump of ham instead of the boney bacon hock. If you do this, add some extra stock powder to compensate for the missing salt.

Credit: The recipe above is based on https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/219170/ham-and-split-pea-soup-recipe-a-great-soup/, with a good few tweaks of my own.