Slow cooker split pea soup recipe

It's Sunday night which means it's soup night! Here's a brilliant winter soup, full of flavour with ideas for flavours cadged from many different recipes. I love it when you pull the best from several different recipes and it all works.

Ingredients for 6:


1 horseshoe shaped smoked sausage - about 1lb or 400-500g  (I use Mattheson's low fat for this and the shape is actually immaterial!) OR a ham hock - see verdict for instructions
500g/16 oz pack yellow split peas
1/2 onion, diced
2 medium carrots, sliced thickly
1.25 L or 5 cups vegetable broth (I used 2 cubes of Marigold bouillon)
1 stick celery, sliced
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp mace
2 bay leaves


Directions:

Add everything to your pot and cook on Low for 8-10 hours (or on High for 4-6). You may wish to semi-blend at the end using a stick blender but we found it unnecessary.

Verdict:

Fab.U.Lous. Easy, comforting, filling food, just right after time outside on a cold winter's day. The mace really makes this but don't overdo it; it's a powerful, bossy flavour and can take over. The split peas after 10 hours were really silky and needed no blending and I like to have some texture to my soup so left the veggies in their chunks.

You could make this with a ham hock, in which case you'd want to take it out at the end and scrape the meat back into the soup, discarding the bone.