Rockin' some good food!

The Meads just got back yesterday from a rockin' awesome weekend at the Shakori Hills Grassroots Music festival up in Silk Hope, NC.  It was so amazing...great music, beautiful weather, good friends.  And good food of course!  

We are so totally broke, so I cooked up a storm before we left.  I made a huge batch of Chicken Curry and a double batch of Pea Soup before we left.  I froze all of it and brought it along.  It worked out great.  The food acted like giant blocks of ice and kept everything cold till we were ready to eat it. 

As an aside, I wanted to talk about buying things that get you multiple meals.  I bought this massive ham last week that was on sale for like 99 cents a pound.  It was about a 12 or 13 pound ham, so I hemmed and hawed about it for a while, but decided it was too good a deal to pass up.  From that one ham we had 2 nights of the most delicious ham (with assorted veggies and other side items), ham and scalloped potatoes, ham sandwiches for lunch, and two nights of killer pea soup.  5 nights of dinner and lunches (not to mention a giant bone for the doggie that still has her looking lovingly at me) for about 12 bucks.  You seriously cannot beat that.

Anyway, the pea soup it easy to make.  Most recipes will call for a ham hock, but I would definitely recommend getting a bone in ham and then using the ham bone for pea soup afterwards.  I froze my ham bone till I was ready to use it.  

Since I had a giant ham bone with tons of meat on it I decided to make a double batch and therefore used two 1 lb bags of split peas.  In my biggest pot I put the ham bone and the 2 bags of split peas and simmered them for 1 1/2 to 2 hours till the peas were disintegrated.  I then chopped and chucked in 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks, and one onion.  I put in about a tsp of ground thyme and shook in some chopped up bay leaves.  I let these simmer until tender and then I removed the ham bone, stripped it of meat and set it aside.   I pureed the soup with my hand blender (an invaluable tool in my opinion) and then dumped in the meat.  At this point you can adjust the salt and pepper to your taste or you can let individuals decide if they want anymore (the ham can be kind of salty to begin with.)

Well, the pea soup was a hit at the festival.   We ate it on the second night and it was so hearty and warming.  The kids ate it up.  All of the preparation (I spent a day cooking my little heart out) was worth it.  I only brought $20 to the festival and half was for parking.  That left a little money for Ralph to get coffee in the mornings and everyone was happy and well fed.   Though I would like to put out a warning, pea soup may produce noxious gases.  Ralph almost killed us in the tent after pea soup night, cough, cough, gag, gag....

We got back last night after a great camping trip all tired and sunburnt and the last half of the pea soup awaited us.  I had some homemade bread dough in the fridge that I baked up and we had that for dinner.  Phenomenal, even better with fresh baked bread.  (And yes, I took the chance of refueling my husband's anoxic gut bacteria, it was worth it for pea soup heaven.)

Amy