Pea Soup and Pumpkin Cornbread

November is Cooking Month at the Shrinking Jeans website, which is perfect — given that I’m going to be doing a lot of real cooking this month!  Yesterday, Heather posted a recipe for Easy Peasy Pea Soup, and today is perfect soup weather, so I knew what I was making for supper.  My recipe is a little different, as we rarely eat meat.  The recipe I follow came from Susan V. at Fat Free Vegan, and is insanely delicious.  The only change I made was omitting the celery and celery seed, because Jesse gives me the most pained grimaces you can image when I try to force him to eat celery.

Split Pea Soup - photographs better before it's cooked, tastes better after.

Usually when I make this soup, I make cornbread to accompany it.  Split pea soup and cornbread just go together, you know?  But I really wanted to make something with pumpkin.  I’ve had a can of pumpkin sitting on the kitchen counter for three days, begging me to open it.  What to do?  What to do? Amazingly, I found a recipe for pumpkin cornbread and knew I had to put it to the test!  No funky ingredients, not too much sugar, a reasonable amount of oil… So I put the kids to work:

Liam took charge of the wet ingredients.

Harry assembled the dry.

and made sure they were well combined.

They worked together to mix well.

The end result -- delectable.

These were a huge hit with everyone.  I’ll definitely be making this recipe again!  Another day of mostly-clean eating done well.