Slow-cooked pea stew

Today's recipe is for a small meal that touches on the themes of healthy, inexpensive and tasty. It's vegan, too.

While too thick to answer to the name "soup", this dish does run along the lines of a pea soup. As for me, I think the texture of the stew is divine.

Before I move on to the How-To, some notes:

• The recipe makes approximately 5 quarts, so you may wish to halve — or perhaps double  ;‍-‍) — the recipe.
• As the white wine is simply for flavor, an inexpensive brand (or even homemade) will do fine.
• All veggies should be diced or thinly sliced, with the exception of garlic, the bulbs of which I de-skinned and left whole. One advantage is that this allows the garlic-shy to spoon out individual bulbs from their bowls and pass them over to a friend.
• Goes great with hunks of a rustic bread.

Here we go:

Slow-cooked Pea Stew

Ingredients:

The wet

• vegetable broth (1 quart)
• water (2 quarts)
• white wine (1/2 cup)
• lemon juice (1 Tbsp)
• canola oil (2 Tbsp)

The dry

• onion (1 large)
• garlic (1 bulb)
• celery (8 stalks)
• carrots (4)
• parsnip (4)
• sweet potato (1)
• split peas (2 lbs)

The seasonings

• black pepper (1/2 tsp)
• basil (dried; 1 Tbsp)
• bay leaves (2)

Directions:

1. Toss everything in a slow-cooker.
2. Let it brew overnight, i.e. 8-10 hours. (I used the low setting.)

Optional:

• Stir in some olive oil (2 Tbsp) at the end of the cooking cycle. (Adding the olive oil earlier than this is to risk it breaking down, losing its nutritional value.)
• Tweak it to your personal specifications by stirring in hot-pepper sauce, extra salt, extra black-pepper, etc.