How to Make Pea Soup

Step #1

Become a quadriplegic.  This is difficult, but it is not impossible.  See Appendix.

Step #2

Prepare your vegetables.  Note that Trader Joe's will prepare your vegetables for you, vis-à-vis Trader Joe's Mirepoix, $2.50 cheap -- but not sporting.  In fact to be truly in the spirit of the endeavor, grow your own.  At least your own onions and garlic.  Carrots?  Buy the colorful ones at the Sunday farmers market.  Celery is celery.

Onions in their natural state come attached to an enormous stem, a.k.a., onion top, which makes the crop easily transportable but confuses the issue.  The issue: what is edible?  Are you supposed to eat the green part, like a spring onion?  How springlike is an onion you buy in the summer?  What about a spring onion you buy in January?  If you tend to think about these things, have someone deal with the onions for you.  Chop off the tops, dispose of them in a distinctly non-compost way, and get on with it.  Getting on with it is very important in making pea soup.

Growing your own garlic is fun, unless you bugger off to Europe around harvest time and return to find that the green garlic tops, pointing like a street sign to the subterranean treasure, have withered, even rotted, into nothingness.  Other crops have displaced the garlic airspace...which means you will have some frantic digging to do.  Never mind, for a head of garlic is unmistakable, even with dirt clods on it.  In fact, all you need do is shake off the dirt and roll inside for your Garlic Preparation.

Place a head of garlic inside a small plastic bag, seal the bag and place it under your left wheelchair tire.  The big tire, of course.  Roll forward.  There will be a crunching sound, but do not be alarmed.  If you must, really must, open the bag and look inside.  You will find that the first tire roll did very little but separate the cloves.  Roll back and forth a few more times to actually separate the peels from the cloves...and the men from the boys.  This is a gratifyingly macho activity, and it doesn't hurt to yell various things like 'die you garlic fuckers' while you roll about with your wheelchair.

Empty the contents of the plastic bag onto a plate.  Yes, it looks a bit chaotic, but so did early Jackson Pollock.  All you have to do is separate peels from garlic.  And, okay, so there's probably a little dirt in there too.  There's probably a little dirt everywhere.  Don't worry about it.  Cleanliness is not next to godliness.  Cleanliness is next to San Diego.

Once the garlic is peeled and crushed, you will feel so good about yourself that the rest of the cooking process will occur almost naturally.  Carrots are foolishly designed with green tops and stringy root ends.  No problem.  Bite off either and with your teeth.  That is correct.  This is a dental process.  Is anyone looking?  I should hope not.  Quadriplegic cooking is no one's business.  What happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen.  The alternative to end-and-top carrot biting involves the use of a knife.  This is to be avoided.  If God had intended quadriplegics to use knives, he would have given them fingers.  Which means, of course, bite not only the ends but the middle...in fact, bite as many times as necessary.  If you fear the addition of saliva to your recipe, rinse the suckers off.  Remember, no one need know.  And if they ask, refer them to the soup.  Which, I assure you, will be very good.

Celery, onions...well, here one must cede ground to the neurologically complete.  Briefly, very briefly, grab a knife, stab each onion on a cutting board with nails sticking up (a standard rehabilitation kitchen device, believe it or not) to stabilize things.  Then cut the onions into quarters, slipping them free of their peels.  The celery...either bite or cut...it takes as long either way, the stuff being so stringy.  Then move on to automation.

The Cuisinart.  This is a Serious Machine.  It is French.  The French invented other Serious Machines such as the guillotine.  So don't buy a wimpy little Cuisinart.  Get a big mother.  Throw all the vegetables described above into its maw and then: press 'chop.'  Don't press 'on,' because your big macho Cuisinart will, within a couple of nanoseconds, reduce all the vegetables to subatomic particles.

Step #3

Meat.  The trick is to worry a lot about this step.  In fact, don't take a step unless it is a guilt-ridden step.  Why guilt?  Because you have made efforts, albeit nominal, to be something of a slightly practicing Jew.  And you know, just know, that pea soup is inescapably German, and that other inescapably German thing, a.k.a., schwein, can be avoided the way scones spurn Devon cream.  You need the ham hock, known in the UK as a ham knuckle, if you are to make a credible pea soup.  The trick is to make the ham hock/knuckle kosher.  How to do this?  The technology may not yet be available, although this is not entirely clear.  I believe the answer is in development and under wraps and will appear shortly.  Meanwhile, in the absence of Pork Koshering Technology, one will have to settle for virtual PKT.

Step #4

Purists will insist that you must add peas to pea soup.  Very well, have it your way.  Dump in some dried peas.  Okay, add some broth or something.  But to be really cool, and to give the sense that you actually know how to cook -- throw in some frozen peas at the last minute.  Frozen peas are, you know, green and bouncy.  They will make the soup feel green and bouncy.  So set off for Trader Joe's with frozen peas in mind, and by the time you have bought some cooked brown rice, noted what's new in chicken burritos, seriously considered the fresh batch of Stilton and thought hard about another bottle of wine...you will have forgotten about the frozen peas and return home without them.  Never mind.  You didn't need them anyway.

Step #5

Cooking is the easiest step of all, the one that requires the least effort and absolutely no knowledge.  Plug in the crockpot.  Slightly differently, plug in the slow-cooker.  You've heard of slow cuisine?  Well this is the slowest.  In fact, expect your pea soup to cook overnight.  Even for a week.  Don't rule out a year.  And maybe for the entire Obama Administration.  Go slow, that is the general quadriplegic rule under any circumstances.  This pertains both to cooking and to....

Step #6

Eat slowly.  Remember, there are many little bones in the Koshered Pork, and because you have committed an obvious transgression, you can count on those bones to drift to the bottom of the cooker, leap invisibly onto your spoon -- then lodge directly in your gullet.  Be careful, and if you're not too stressed out, enjoy.