Split Pea Soup

I went to college in a cool town called Bellingham, WA. I loved it...a total college town. I really miss it and wish there was some way I could live there, although maybe it doesn't hold the same appeal after college? I don't know. There are tons of good restaurants (and cool bars, but that's a post for a different time or maybe never. You may lose all respect for me if you knew how often I frequented the bars in college...and how many of them.), so whenever I'd go back up there prior to moving to AZ it was always a tough decision where to eat.

There's a part of town called Fairhaven that has all these funky shops and restaurants (not so many bars though). Very artsy and kind of hippie (I couldn't decide if hippie was the right spelling or hippy...seriously, I went back and forth between the two about five times). There's a bookstore there that has a restaurant in the downstairs of it, Colophon Cafe. I heart Colophon! One of my most embarassing moments happened there. I'll tell you the story so you can feel a little more clued in on my life. ;) My roommate Courtney and I had gone there to get dinner one night and study. I had really bad body image issues in college, so I was complaining about how fat I was (and in reality I wasn't at all but I thought so at the time and now I'd give just about anything to look like I did then). Courtney busts out with--in a pretty loud voice for a mostly empty restaurant--"Claire, I've seen you naked and you have nothing to complain about." Nice, huh?

Anyway...

My mom really liked Colophon when she'd come up to visit me, and she bought (or I got her as a gift, I don't remember) their cookbook. I stole it from her awhile back and scanned a bunch of the recipes from things I loved there. This recipe I'd had for awhile and made on occasion. I was moving some stuff around in my pantry today and discovered a bag of split peas and thought, "I'm going to make soup!" i don't think this is quite as good as it was at the restaurant, but it's pretty good. And completely vegetarian!

 

I'm trying a new feature I saw in my Picasa Photo Viewer. It had a link to "Blog This!" so I did. It brought up a window to type my blog entry and had a link to the picture already on it. Hopefully it's big enough that you can see the recipe.