Electric Soup!

I bought my copy of Stephanie O'Dea's Crockpot Cookbook, "Make It Fast, Cook It Slow" this week, and it's everything Stephanie's website is and more. Check it out, and get Slow-Cooking!

I love my Slow Cooker, it makes life easy when you're busy. As Stephanie says in her Recipe Book, It's good to get the cooking preparation sorted in the morning when you're still heavily caffeinated, than in the evening with tired kids hanging on your ankles. By evening, there are good smells wafting from the kitchen and you can get down to the business of relaxing. Or doing homework. Or ironing while yelling at the kids to do the homework.

Anyway, the perfect thing here, if I had any sense, would be an awesome example of what I cooked today in my slow cooker! But I didn't use my slow cooker today. Alas. However, I made a family favourite which I HAVE made in the slow cooker before, but today I made it on the stove, so I'll give you that recipe:

Electric Soup! This catchy name was invented by Sean one day, back when the boys were going through a not-eating-vegetables phase. The bright orangeness of this soup, along with it's creamy sweetness and lack of detectable vegetable lumps, make it a kids' favourite. Even visiting carnivores have second helpings.

This serves five, twice. Freezes and reheats really well.

• Sauté a chopped onion and four cloves of crushed garlic in olive oil
• Transfer to crockpot if you're going to slow cook
• Add water OR stock to half fill your pot (a ham bone makes THE BEST stock for this soup)
• And about a cup of yellow split peas or red lentils
• Throw in all of the orange stuff you can find: pumpkin, squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, red sweet peppers. Today I added some leeks, which aren't orange, but they were shrivelling up in the fridge so I used them
• And some parsley
• Check water level. You might want to add some liquid
• Salt to taste

Cook everything until the split peas or lentils are dissolving, (I've slowcooked this for 6 hours and it was fine) and blend it CAREFULLY with a hand blender. If you're not an experienced hand-blenderer, let the soup cool first because it may leap out of the pot onto your hands. Ow.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream on top, or some chopped parsley (grownups only!), or crumbled feta cheese (to die for!) or cubes of cheddar, which go all melty-stretchy and awesome.

Rats, now I'm hungry again.