Vegan Split Pea Soup

Spring is doing what spring does in Utah — the mountains still have snow on top but the valley is warming up, and the tulips in the front yard are coming in red and yellow because I planted them last September, when Grace was alive and planting tulip bulbs felt like the kind of thing a mother of six does on a Saturday afternoon. The tulips don't know she's gone. They just bloom. I find this both comforting and unbearable.

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This was a school week, just a school week, and I'm learning that school weeks are the scaffolding holding my life upright. The alarm goes off. I pack lunches. Brandon leaves for work at seven-thirty and I drive Ethan and Olivia to school and drop Mason at first grade and bring Lily to kindergarten and then it's me and Noah, who is two and wants nothing from me except snacks and attention, and I can do those things. I can cut grapes in half and sit on the floor and build a block tower. I can be a mother to a two-year-old. It's the rest of it — the six-child version of me, the one who kept a household of eight running like Denise Cooper with a chore chart and a plan — I can't find her yet.

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I tried to cook a real dinner on Wednesday. Not boxed, not frozen, not drive-through. Taco soup — ground beef, cans of beans, cans of tomatoes, a packet of ranch seasoning and a packet of taco seasoning. It's my mother's recipe, if you can call opening cans a recipe, and it takes twenty minutes and feeds everyone and costs almost nothing. I stood at the stove and browned the beef and opened the cans and poured them in and thought: this is the first meal I've made from scratch since January. Three months. The math landed hard.

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But the kids ate it. Mason had two bowls. Ethan put sour cream on his, which is new — he's eleven and developing opinions about toppings, which feels like evidence that life is moving forward whether I'm ready or not. Lily ate three bites and asked for a peanut butter sandwich, which is what Lily does with every meal, and I made the sandwich without argument because choosing battles requires energy I don't have.

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After dinner I washed the pot and looked at Grace's photo above the stove. The bathtub one. Soap in her hair. I said, "I made taco soup." Out loud, to a photograph, in an empty kitchen. It's the most honest prayer I've managed in months.

Denise gave me this recipe two years ago and I never made it until that night—it lived on my phone under a folder called “someday.” Someday turned out to be a Tuesday in April when I needed something that asked almost nothing of me but still counted as feeding my family. You chop an onion, you chop some carrots, you let the pot do the rest. If you’re in a season where standing at the stove for fifty quiet minutes feels like the most you can manage, this is the recipe for that season.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 50 min | Total Time: 1 hr | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 yellow onion
4 carrots
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound split peas
8 cups vegetable broth
1 teaspoon liquid smoke
Kosher salt
Fresh ground pepper

Instructions

Prep the vegetables. Chop the onion and carrots. Mince the garlic. (If you’ve got a pressure cooker, head to Instant Pot Split Pea Soup for the next step.)
Sauté the aromatics. In a large soup pot or Dutch oven over medium high heat, heat the olive oil. Add the onion and carrots and saute for 2 minutes. Add garlic and split peas and saute for 1 minute.
Simmer until thickened. Add the vegetable broth. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 45 to 55 minutes, until the split peas fall apart and the soup becomes thickened. If you’d like, with a hand-held immersion blender, pulse a few times to yield a smoother yet still chunky texture.
Season and serve. Stir in the liquid smoke, kosher salt, and fresh ground pepper. Garnish with smoked paprika if desired.

Nutrition (per serving)

Vegan Split Pea Soup — The Meal That Asked Almost Nothing of Me