Vindaloo

It started out as Split Pea Soup, but things have a way of morphing in my kitchen.

I had a lovely vat of home brewed chicken broth, and it was a chilly (for Arizona !) day, so a nice bowl of homemade soup seemed appropriate.  DH loves split pea soup, so the above result revealed itself.

I had made some beef and veggies (beef, carrots, celery, onions, potatoes) in the InstantPot the night before, and had the veggies and some of these lovely rigatoni noodle-y things left over.  A plan was forming.

When hams are on sale around holidays, I always get one, whack it into meal-sized pieces and freeze the pieces for occasions such as this.  This gave me plenty of generously-sized ham pieces to brown up separately and add to the soup.

Then I raided  the carrots, celery and onions and added them to the split pea soup, along with some of the rigatoni that I heated separately so it wouldn’t cool the soup too much.

I always keep the pasta (or any other addition like this) out separately from a dish because they soak up all the juices whilst in the refrigerator.  Bonus:  This allows me to vary the starch in any given dish for variety.

The Penzey’s Vindaloo addition was really nice.  I’m not a big fan of curry, but this is “curry light” – just enough bite to be interesting, but not the overwhelming feeling I always get from a traditional Indian dish.

In fact, yesterday I made a batch of barley in the Nissan vacuum bottle and then added that to the same soup, for an entirely different feel.  By this time, the split peas had turned to complete mush and were just part of the broth, so the barley turned the whole thing into a completely different soup.

I misjudged how much we would eat of the soup, and put barley in all that was left.  And then we didn’t eat it all.  So, now I will have another thick soup.  Barley doesn’t soak up as much of the fluid as either noodles or rice, but does its share.

I have several cups of soup left, so we’ll see what lunchtime brings today.

 

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