Fiery Sausage and Split Pea Soup

I improvised this recipe while staring at a pound of green split peas in my pantry--and not wanting to make up a regular boring pot of the same old split pea soup.

So I worked in a little bit of meat, added a ton of spice to it, and yet kept the recipe simple and stripped down to the point where it's one of the easiest recipes in this blog's entire history.

Today's post is the result, and this soup was so easy and so good that it's going immediately into Casual Kitchen's heavy rotation. I hope you enjoy the delicious spiciness (and more importantly, the laughable cheapness) of this CK original recipe as much as we do.
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Fiery Sausage and Split Pea Soup

Ingredients:
1 pound green split peas
about 10 cups water
1-2 beef, chicken or veggie bouillon cubes
3-4 spicy Italian-style sausage links
2 medium onions, chopped coarsely into slivers
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper, or other hot pepper
2 teaspoons Tabasco
4-5 carrots, chopped coarsely

Directions:
1) Combine water, split peas and bouillon cubes in a large pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer.

2) While the split peas are coming to a boil, cut the sausage into chunks and saute in a lightly-oiled non-stick pan. Once the sausages have started to brown just a bit, add the onions, cayenne pepper and Tabasco and saute on medium-high heat for 7-10 minutes, or until the sausages are well browned and the onions are soft and browning in places. Remove from heat.

3) Finally, coarsely chop the carrots, and add them, along with the the sausage, onions and spices, to the large pot with the split peas and water. Simmer for about 25-35 minutes, or until the split peas and carrots are cooked to your desired tenderness. Serve with rice or brown rice.

Serves 6.
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Recipe Notes:
1) Regarding the spices: As with most of my recipes, the spices in this soup are a variable you can adjust to your whims. If you're a wuss, cut the cayenne and Tabasco in half. If you absolutely love spicy food, go ahead and add try adding an extra 1/2 teaspoon of each.

2) Indulge me while I gratuitously plug the exceptional cookbook Almost Meatless, which stylistically inspired this recipe. This cookbook is simply exceptional, and it captures exactly the style of cooking we love here at Casual Kitchen.

3) And finally, let me non-gratuitously plug the laughable cheapness of today's recipe: My total cost was about $3.89, thanks in part to finding sausage links on sale at my local grocery store. This works out to a hilarious per-serving cost of less than 70c. Better still, if you were to make a vegetarian version of this soup, you could easily get your per-serving cost down to 50c. And people still try to claim that it costs too much to eat healthy food.








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