A good meal with friends- that was practically free!

Last night I made a free dinner!  Scrumptious split pea soup (it said scrumptious on the soup mix!) with a loaf of Parmesan peppercorn bread.  You may be wondering to yourself, "How was this delightful sounding meal free?"  Well I'll tell you.  The soup mix had been kicking around in our cupboard for, well, forever.  The ham we added to the soup was leftover from Thanksgiving- we had frozen it almost immediately (and, coincidentally, was free to begin with because it was from Andrew's work).  The bread was made with ingredients we either had on hand or (like the bread flour and yeast) were going to buy anyway to fuel my bread maker habit.

We invited the Ramseys and the Siders over to share in the feast since a) we like them all a lot and b) this was clearly going to be far too much food for two people to eat.

Let's start with the amazing bread.  And yes, it WAS amazing.

All the ingredients in the order I have to put them in the machine (water first, yeast last)

Here they all are!  You can't see half of them because they are layered carefully under the flour.

Here she is!  The machine herself!  ...the cats don't trust it...

Now let's look at how pretty the soup looks!  ...okay...it actually doesn't look that pretty.  Look beyond the fact that it is a hunk of meat sticking out of some murky looking water, and realize that it is a huge ham oozing non-stop flavor into the already flavorful broth of a split pea soup mix and understand that our house smelled amazing.

Not pretty to look at, but VERY pretty to eat.  In fact, there were no leftovers.

 Let's go back to the best part now: the bread.  Because I made it.  And that is pretty awesome.

Getting all puffy and sprinkled lovingly with asiago (which ended up smelling very odd as it cooked)

Even more puffy!

All golden-brown and delicious!  

Kinda sunk down in the middle...ah well

I won't lie, it was pretty popular.  Those last pieces were gone mere seconds after I took this picture.