salvageable

That is the word to describe dinner at our house tonight. I saw a blog post about a yellow split pea and sausage soup. I thought I would do something like that. I had bought some natural polish sausage a couple weeks ago on sale and thought I'd use that with the dried split green peas I had.

I soaked my peas overnight. They looked great this morning. I put them in the crock pot with my kitchen stock from the fridge. This was where it all went wrong. I've been trying to incorporate more of the ideas I've been reading in Nourishing Traditions. Part of that is to add a little vinegar to bone broth to help get all the nutrients out of the bone. Well, I hadn't really read that part yet when I made the stock so I just added a big splash of vinegar to my pot of bones. It smelled really strongly of vinegar at the time, but I didn't worry about it. Too much.

I think there was just too much acid in my stock for my split peas to cook. After 5 hours or so on high, the peas were still like rocks. So I transferred the peas and the sausage to a soup pot (along with some sauteed onion, garlic, carrots and celery root). I added about 10 cups of water. After simmering for over an hour. Still hard as ever.

Soooooo. Last night I had made a pot roast. I had a ton of potatoes leftover and was thinking I would use them as a hash or something later this week. I pulled out the potatoes and put them in my big oval Le Cruset. I fished out the sausage, carrots and celery root and put that in along with some liquid.

Salvageable. And I made pita bread for the first time today. I figure as long as there is fresh bread on the table, the dinner can be so and so and no one will really care!