Back to California home cooking

I was looking for a recipe for split pea soup a la Andersen's in Buellton, north of Santa Barbara. At home we always had it out of a can but after I spent 2 1/2 years in Colombia, I learned that you always make soup at home from scratch. In Colombia you don't use recipes, you cook by taste and according to what you have. Evidently Buellton and the Andersens are too far south to make it into Michele Anna Jordan's California cookbook because the closest recipe is one for lentils and seived eggs. Lentil soup, she says, was popular with the 60s' health food crowd but only seasoned with soy sauce and it did not have the "finesse" of today's cooking, which is influenced by French country cuisine. Hm. Lentil soup seasoned with soy sauce. I must try that.

Jordan did have an interesting aside on "How to Kill a Chicken" about Betty Fussell, "author of wonderful cookbooks and of scholarly books on food in America" who grew up in Southern California, a child of the Depression. I'll have to get the book Jordan refers to, Christmas Memories with Recipes for Mother, who also grew up in Southern California during the Depression.

I'll make my own split pea soup, with a ham bone, onions, carrots and celery but I was looking for a little inspiration. I could try the Swedish yellow split pea soup. I wonder what the difference is between the yellow and the green: are the yellow simply more mature? There is a recipe on the web on a site called "cdkitchen.com but andersen is spelled wrong and the recipe only has 3 out of 5 stars so I don't expect much from it. (Oh, wait, that's 3 out of 5 for difficulty (it has 5 stars from 1 review) but the recipe doesn't look great - no sauteeing of the vegetables and a vigorous boiling of the soup. Might as well do their split pea soup mix...) You'd think the cdkitchen site would display the recipes according to the number of stars they got but they just slap them on the page. So much for cdkitchen.

Second stop on the google search was the blog of the Fat Free Vegan's Yellow Split Pea Soup with Sweet Potato and Kale. This sounds interesting because she uses Penzey's Maharajah Style Curry Powder and anyone who uses Penzeys' spices is ok in my book, even if I've heard that you should grind your own curry powder fresh. And look, you can get a printer friendly version of the recipe. I wonder how she did that. I'll have to investigate. Now, what would happen if I made this recipe with green split peas??