Split Pea Soup

Split pea soup, otherwise known as ham soup if you're talking to a 3 year old who doesn't think they like split peas, is the necessary second dish after making a ham. It's just wrong to waste a ham bone by not making it into soup. When you decide to cook a ham, you're really deciding to make a ham and split pea soup, every time. Prepare yourself for the commitment.

Spit Pea Soup

Split pea soup photographs badly, especially when it's almost gone. 

Start this at 10:00 am. It's an all day sit on the couch and keep telling people that you're busy cooking so you can't possibly do any chores kind of meal.
One ham bone, lots of ham still attached to it, the more the better.
One pound of split peas
2-3 carrots, peeled and sliced
1/2 Onion - dried or fresh and diced
2-3 Cloves of garlic - dried or fresh and diced
First you need to sort the peas. The package always says to do this and I never thought it was really necessary until I got my first rock. For some reason, about every 5 packages or so, there is a small rock that looks mostly like a pea, but doesn't taste at all like a pea. I think it's probably part of the automated picking equipment or something. They manage to get most of the rocks out, but one occasionally slips through quality control. Just pick through them in a colander, it's worth the five minutes. Place the peas and the ham bone and, well, everything else in a pot. Put in enough water to cover, or at least come close to covering, the bone. The package of peas will call for 8-10 cups of water and this is usually about right in my experience. If you need to put in more, that's ok, you can boil off the extra at the end. Now simmer the soup on low for about 5 hours covered. If you started this at 10:00 in the morning as suggested it's about 3:00 and the ham that was left on the bone is now falling off. Scoop the bone and all the ham that you can and put them on a cutting board to cool. You need to sort the edible ham from the knuckles and fat and bone and it's easier to do that when you're not swearing at them for burning you. After 20-30 minutes of cooling, sort out those previously mentioned knuckles and bone and fat that you don't really want to eat and discard them. Take the rest of the edible ham and chop it up and throw it back in. Now you need to keep simmering and stirring every half hour or so until dinner time. If you had to add more water in the beginning then simmer with the lid off for a while and boil off the extra. If things seem a bit too thick, add water to thin it out. Taste it a lot. I wouldn't add any salt or pepper until it's time to serve as the flavor seems to evolve the whole time it's cooking.
Now enjoy your soup. It's a complete meal, meat and veggies all in one pot. If you have space in your fridge, you don't even have any clean up, just let the pot cool and throw the whole thing in the fridge for leftovers. Take a break after dinner, you've been cooking all day and you deserve it.