A winter staple in the pantries of both my families is a bag of dried split peas. They don't need to be soaked before cooking, so they were always the go-to meal when my parents were short on time. We'd blend some of them so that they would cook faster, then make the soup using a recipe from my grandma or a recipe from a cookbook, depending on how fancy we wanted to make it.
One day when I came home from school to my Dad's place, he had the usual supplies out on the kitchen counter beside my great-grandma's coffee grinder. I was 5 or 6 at the time. I knew he'd been cleaning up the coffee grinder for a few days, but I didn't know what it had to do with making soup. Great-Grandma liked to go to the dump and see what she could find that other people had discarded. One time, she got the coffee grinder!
Dad said that, instead of blending the peas, we were going to grind them in the coffee grinder! I wasn't sure how the grinder worked, but I've always loved gadgets, so I thought it was worth a try. Besides, we had a lot of peas, so if it didn't work out we could still have soup. Dad set a little piece of foil in the drawer, shaped so that it would catch the ground peas. We took turns putting a handful in and grinding them, then dumping the result into a cup. When we got the cup full, we decided that was enough to start the broth. It was definitely more time-consuming that using the blender, but it worked and I learned how coffee grinders worked, besides. The resulting soup seemed even more delicious than it had at other times. We went back to using the blender after that, but I would occasionally look at the grinder and smile, remembering the soup.
I used a public domain photo of split peas for the background, a cluster from “Soul Food” by Connie Prince, an element & a paper from “Sugar & Spice Bakery” by the GingerBread Ladies/Kristmess/Karen Schulz, an alpha from “Be Festive” by Blue Heart Scraps, and 2 elements from “Caffeine Addict” by Heather Z Scraps.
