Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! I hope you got in some green beer or corned beef hash to celebrate! I’ve been spending my day drinking a lot of green juices. Not sure why, but I decided this weekend was the best one to try a juice cleanse. I’ll let you know how it went tomorrow, in the meantime, back to the soup.
In an effort to expand the staples we have on hand, we added dry beans to our pantry list. We have always used canned in the past so this soup (and burritos we had for lunch this last week) were the first time we had to start completely from scratch. We measured out enough beans for both the soup recipe and our lunch and let it soak overnight.
When I woke up in the morning, The beans had expanded and only half of them were still in the water. I quickly moved them to a larger bowl and topped them with more water to soak for the rest of the day. When we got home from work we split the bowl in half and started one pan cooking for lunch and held the other half back for our soup.
I started heating oil in a stock pot and added in 1 onion, 1 leek, a couple of cloves of garlic and some cumin.
Once the veggies started to soften up and the onions became slightly translucent, we added in a few strips of chopped up bacon.
When the bacon had browned a bit, in went the beans…
…followed quickly by some chicken stock and a bit of water.
The soup was brought to a boil and then left to simmer for about an hour on the stove (not exactly a quick weeknight dinner).
When the time was up, I ladled about half of the soup into the blender.
Boom. liquified.
I added the blended portion back into the pot and mixed it in, as well as seasoned it with salt and pepper.
From there, we added a dollop of sour cream and dug in. It was very filling and satisfying for as few ingredients as it called for. I may have added too much soup to the blender though as it was a little watery. The sour cream had some trouble staying on the surface. We finished all our leftovers so I’d call it a success. I’m also glad we utilized our dried beans instead of reaching for the canned beans again. We have a better idea of how to time things out and how much water you really need to rehydrate. I’m going to look into ways to prep dried beans for our crock pot chili and maybe making our own chili beans with our own seasonings. However, with the thought of spring around the corner, I’d rather start thinking of black bean salsa on the back patio.
mmmMinneapolis 