Peasy-Easy Slow Cooker Split Pea Soup

Get that slow cooker out of the cupboard and try this soup!
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Of course it’s holiday time. And while we’re busy with festivities, trying to get cookies baked, attempting to find or wrap gifts, spreading words of good cheer, going to concerts, figuring out if we’re naughty or nice (I know what I am) and maybe even decorating the house, we still have to eat. Magazines, newspapers, tv shows, and social media feeds are full of cheeseballs topped with red and green peppers, hard-looking painted sugar cookies (not my style), and awesome instructions for making the perfect Christmas day roast beef, should you be able to afford one. But right now we’re still wondering, “What’s for dinner?” If you’re anything like me, you feel like a very rich woman indeed when a slow cooker is bubbling away all day in the kitchen promising dinner minus the 5pm shuffle to the fridge and the eye-roll glance into the pantry to see what you can come up with. Dinner’s a done deal. You could have skied or shopped all day because come 6 o’clock, there’s nothing left to do but grab a bowl, get a spoon, and pour the wine. And if you love spit pea soup, but never make it, my simple version’s the one for you. There’s a tish of prep before you dump — an unfortunate cooking expression if ever there was one — everything in the pot and push the start button, but I promise it’s not much and offers greatly increased taste. So don’t skip it, ok?

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Pumpkin-Cranberry Bread

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I know without question I cannot bake and cook at the same time. Disaster awaits. Or at the very least, serious unhappiness. There must be either a baking morning and a cooking afternoon or some variation thereof. This doesn’t mean I won’t stir up a pan of cornbread while my beans finish cooking at 5:30 or that I’d refuse to bake cookies if the slow cooker was on. No, no, no–not at all. But it does mean I shouldn’t be chopping and adding ingredients to a soup and think I can also whip up a loaf or two of quick bread in the the short minutes between soup chores. Because if I do, the bread will be missing its cinnamon, for instance, or in this case, its very necessary salt. And I might serve the soup without making sure all of its ingredients were just as tender as they should be. Which I did — and sent it to ill neighbors like that. (I hope the carrots weren’t crunchy. God, Alyce.)

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Slow Cooker Sweet Potato-Lentil Soup with Italian Sausage

After Thanksgiving, and just before the Christmas cookie baking and bingeing, it might be time for a big, thick, healthy slow-cooker soup.  If you practice the great tradition of Advent, maybe you’re cleaning your physical as well as your spiritual house in preparation for greeting God. Whatever the case, this meal is great for dinner and then to take for filling lunches and will keep you from hitting the candy machine or the chip bag about 3pm. Probably.

below:  daughter Emily baking apple pie for our Thanksgiving

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Having just spent a week at the beach, it was hard for me to come back to reality. (Too much pie, of course. Is that possible?) But it was time to find something to cook for dinner and I took the easy way out:  slow-cooker. Continue reading