I goofed up big time on a meal for our neighbours last night. I was making slow cooked split pea soup with a ham hock* and whole wheat focaccia bread. First of all, I completely killed the bread - it was as hard and thin as a cracker. Bah to that. The recipe called for 24 hours rising time in the refrigerator but I rushed it without adding extra yeast, silly me. I guess I normally leave whole wheat bread to rise even longer than white bread so that might have been the second reason for its lack of rising. It rose beautifully for the first two sittings but just sat there for the last one. Secondly, my soup came out really really salty. Unfortunately, if I follow a recipe, I like to really follow the recipe so Jbird can't say Did you follow the recipe? if it turns out wrong. This recipe called for 5 cups of chicken stock* along with the ham hock. My instincts told me: the ham hock will create loads and loads of flavour, you don't need chicken stock as well. But for some reason I ignored those instincts and added all that stock anyway. When the soup was basically ready, I tasted it and was really annoyed to find that while it looked absolutely gorgeous and perfect, lovely and green and thick, it tasted really really salty. To try and fix it, I added as much water as I could without compromising its thickness and served it anyway. I think my replacement open face cheese toasties*** soaked up some of the salt. I used some lovely Gouda cheese on them and it wasn't too sad not to have home made bread.
This morning I'm cooking up some more split peas to add to the left over soup to calm down the overdose in flavour. I will freeze it in small one and two serving size Tupperware. We love defrosting home made frozen soup for lunch in this cold weather.
*some ham on a bone
** American term for stock: broth
***American term for cheese toasties: grilled cheese sandwiches
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