Split pea soup

The beginning of January is the darkest time of the winter, Christmas is over and all the lights are coming down, the constant parties are over, it is time to snuggle down crank up the heat or light the fire and wallow in comfort food. One of my comfort foods is split pea soup.  If I am not feeling well, or just extremely lazy the only canned soup I will touch is Habitant pea soup.  This weekend I was not feeling ill or lazy, I just felt like pea soup, so I decided to make my own.

Makes about 6 servings

1 meaty ham hock (I picked up a beautiful ham hock from Hopcott's)
1 tablespoon of olive oil
2 leeks cleaned and chopped
4 carrots
1 bay leaf
450g package of split green peas

Cover the ham hock with water in a large pot

Ham with brown sugar mustard glaze.

I was hosting Easter dinner for the family this year and when I asked my sons and husband what they wanted, they all agreed, baked ham.  So I drove out to Hopcott's to pick up one of their hams and came home with a much larger ham than I had intended.  But after feasting on left over ham all week I do not regret it all.  Any way it was a beautiful ham and made a wonderful center piece to the Easter dinner table.

I cooked it simply, as I had every faith as it was from Hopcott's it would be a very good ham.  All at the dinner table said it was a great ham, was that because it was just a good ham or did the cooking method have something to do with it?  I guess I will never know, but any way this is how I cooked it.

one picnic ham (in this case it was boneless)
2 cups of apple juice
1/2 cup of brown sugar
1/2 cup of dijjon mustard

Place ham in large roasting pan slice off most of the fat and score in diamonds, just because it looks pretty no other reason.