Vegetarian Curried Split Pea Soup (Secret Ingredient)

Curried Yellow Split Pea Soup

Get your stockpots ready, everyone: It’s National Split Pea Soup week!

(And to think you almost missed it.)

The brainchild of the Northern Pulse Growers Association, National Split Pea Soup Week is celebrated the second week of November, when the nip in the air makes a hearty bowl of soup sound just about like heaven.

Of course, my mother will find it deeply ironic that I’m celebrating peas. Because as a kid, I hated them—and I mean hated them! In fact, the only way I would even consider eating peas was if they were “creamed.” Translation: drowning in a sauce made of butter, sugar, flour, and, well, pea juice. (It sounds gross, but it actually tasted pretty good.)

Fast forward 25 years. That persnickety little girl has become a woman whose diet (at least on a good day) centers around vegetables, and peas play a central role! (No one’s more surprised than I am, trust me.) I keep a bag of crisp freeze-dried peas in my bag for quick snacks, since peas have a satisfying balance of protein and carbs. What’s more, one of my favorite meals is filling, diet-friendly split pea soup. No, not the kind with ham—I prefer plant-powered split pea soups, like those featured in Bravo! and the Health Promoting Cookbook. (Both of which I highly recommend.) In fact, until I developed this vegetarian split pea soup, I alternated between those two recipes, making them in bulk and freezing them in wide-mouth jars with plastic lids.

Secret ingredient for sensational split pea soup

For National Split Pea Soup week, though, I wanted to create something a little more special. An outside-the-box split pea soup with unexpected ingredients that layer together to create a soup you’ll want to make over and over again.

So I drew not only from my favorite split pea soup recipes, but also Alton Brown’s recipe to make a completely vegan curried split pea soup. That’s right: No meat or milk in sight! But don’t think for a second that it’s lacking in flavor: Replete with yellow split peas, golden corn, garnet sweet potatoes, and just the right amount of curry powder, this soup is mellow and delicious. And what about the secret ingredient, you ask? Why, it’s chopped dried apricot, which adds a bright, sunny note to this super soup. (Which, incidentally, has a whopping 20 grams of protein per serving, making it one satisfying supper.)

Enjoy!