Soup made easy. Enjoy your delicious chunky vegetable soup fix without all the chopping it usually necessitates.

Directions

1. Into a 12-quart pot, place split peas, zucchini, carrots. Fill the pot with water to cover, and allow to cook 60 minutes with the lid on.

2. Add soup mix and cook an additional five minutes.

3. Now, here’s the great trick: Take out your potato masher. Mash the cooked carrots and squash with it.

4. It yields nice, chunky vegetable pieces easily and is definitely much faster than spending time chopping and dicing raw, hard vegetables. If you want more color in your soup you can even skip peeling the zucchini in the initial step.

Notes: This soup is so versatile, and it never disappoints. You don’t have to stick to carrots and squash specifically. Go ahead and prepare this soup substituting your favorite veggies instead of the squash and carrots (think butternut squash, kohlrabi, parsley, onion, etc.). You can even throw in barley or pasta for a heavier all-in-one soup. Make sure to up the water content, though.

Variations: You can shortcut this soup even further by using a packet of split pea soup mix, found in the bean aisle in narrow packages such as by Manischewitz. (One package will not yield 12 quarts like the recipe above, though.)

Here’s what you’ll do: Throw the soup mix ingredients into a pot (reserving the flavored powder packet for later). Add two squash and three big carrots. Add water to cover. Cook 40 minutes, covered, add the packet of powder, cook five minutes, and then mash.