Snowy Day Soup

I love to make soup. There's something so satisfying about chopping and mixing and putting things together to make something delicious - but don't give me a recipe! I might look at some soup recipes for ideas, but most of the time I like to just mix things together and see what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but sometimes I get really lucky, like this weekend.

We bought a Honeybaked Ham for Christmas, and I put the bone in the freezer. Friday, when we were out for snow, I took it out, put it in a big pot, covered it with water, and boiled it for a couple of hours. When that was done and the house smelled AMAZING, I took it off the stove and set it aside.

In a heavy dutch oven, I heated about a tablespoon of olive oil and sauteed one sweet onion, a clove of garlic, and about a cup of chopped celery. Then I washed and peeled all the potatoes we had in the pantry. There were about 8 medium to large red potatoes that were starting to go bad, so I diced all of those and added them to the vegetables, sprinkling everything with freshly ground black pepper and just a pinch of kosher salt (don't need much salt when you have ham).

While all that was browning, I took the ham bone and all the meat out of the broth, and put it in a bowl. I skimmed as much fat as possible off the broth, and added a couple of cups of broth to the vegetables in the dutch oven. When that was simmering nicely, I looked in the fridge and found a few baby carrots left in a bag. I cut those in pieces and added them to the pot.

Back to the ham - I picked all the juicy pieces of ham off the bone, removed as much fat as I could, and chopped it into bite-sized pieces. Then I added that and the rest of the broth to the soup. About that time, I remembered that we still had a few quart packages of corn from our garden in the freezer. It was a couple of years old, but I thought it would be a nice addition to the soup. I took it out of the freezer, cut the bag off with scissors, and put it in the pot. I cooked the soup until the corn was done and the potatoes and carrots were soft. The starch from the corn and potatoes gave it a thick, chowdery consistency.

I made a pan of cornbread and cooked some Golden Delicious apples in a little water, light butter, a teaspoon of white sugar, teaspoon of brown sugar, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. That was our lunch, along with the soup. It was delicious - the perfect snowy day meal!