Ham bone soup

Today I finally did something I've been meaning to do for ages, save the bone from a honey baked ham and throw it in a pot for soup. I didn't want to make a special trip for it or anything, so I just threw together some odds and ends in my kitchen. I'm still not very confident about improvising dishes, but I figured if it didn't work out it wasn't like I bought anything special. I started by sauteing an onion in the bottom of my big stew pot. I had originally wanted peas, as my I grew up eating a mean split pea and ham bone soup my mother makes, but I didn't have any, so I used a bag of brown lentils I've had lying around forever instead. In they went with the ham bone. I seasoned it simply using salt, pepper, thyme, and bay leaves, then covered everything with fresh water. That I boiled for a couple of hours on the stove, coming by periodically to stir it and see if the meat left on the ham bone could be knocked off into the soup. I had been eating the leftover ham off that bone for several days now, but I found that there was quite a bit left that was too hard to cut off with a knife and fork. It came off easily as it softened in the boiling water, so the broth became quite meaty. When it was finished it wasn't as thick as I wanted; I think I put too much water in in the beginning. Tossing the bare bone in the trash, I considered pureeing it to thicken it, then eat it for dinner tonight. But then it occurred to me that made from meat scraps as it was, it was probably very fatty. It might be better if I put it in the fridge overnight, so the fat would have time to rise to the top and condense into a solid layer I could easily scrape off. Perhaps I could even save it to use as a cooking medium for something else. I wasn't sure if pureeing it would disrupt the separation process, so I decided to hold off on that until after I'd defatted the next day. I will eat it tomorrow, and I'll hit it with the stick blender just before I do. Not sure how good it will be, as there's basically nothing but lentils and junk ham in it, but it smelled delicious while it was cooking, so I have high hopes.