It’s time to make winter soups again.\u00a0 The ingredients for a good hefty winter soup are now in the house, and the beans–which always before I measured only by volume, 4 cups for a full batch in the 12 quart pot–I also weighed, this time.\u00a0\u00a0 One pound, eleven point three ounces.\u00a0\u00a0 Very close to one and three quarter pounds of dried beans.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a mix of those dry beans available in the supermarket (no lentils, no split peas), so whatever someone else uses in a mix of beans is likely to be a slightly different weight for the 4 cups.\u00a0 For a smaller soup, less of the bean mix.\u00a0 I made a half-soup earlier this year with 2 cups of beans, one onion, and similar reductions on everything else.<\/p>\n
This will be, like the soups-new-to-me last year that combined “my” bean soup with “my” vegetable soup,\u00a0 a mix of fresh, canned, frozen, and dry ingredients.\u00a0 Dried beans will go in tomorrow morning (or maybe this evening, depending) after a soak in cold water, and include red kidney, small red, Navy (white),\u00a0 Great Northern (white), black, pinto (brown on beige speckled), and Anasazi (dark red and white splotched.)\u00a0 Barley will go in at the end, just long enough to cook it. \u00a0 Fresh: celery, onion, carrot, green Bell peppers, white button mushrooms.\u00a0 Frozen: yellow corn kernels, green beans, spinach.\u00a0 Canned or jarred: RoTel diced tomato & green chilis, minced garlic.\u00a0 Plus a mix of meats–smoked pork hocks and a chuck roast cut up into cubes.\u00a0 The beef chunks get browned before they go in the soup; the pork is ready to go in from the start.<\/p>\n
This is the soup that literally saved us during the week without power below (sometimes VERY below) freezing, last February,\u00a0 when we were snowed & iced in, no heat in the house, and cooked on the old beat up BBQ.\u00a0 I had 8 or 9 quarts in the freezer and was VERY glad I’d developed the combined recipe because it did the job for us.\u00a0\u00a0 I had part of a package of ham hocks and a pound of pork sausage…that went in about halfway through the week, along with a can or two of diced tomatoes.<\/p>\n
Seasonings: black peppercorns, bay leaves, Peruvian Chile Lime spice mix, Italian herb mix.\u00a0\u00a0 I have some homemade chicken broth in the freezer, from the chicken breasts I’ve boiled for my diet meals, so that will go in at the start, and I’ll probably throw in a couple of beef bouillon cubes as well.\u00a0 Exact seasoning amounts vary with the batch, and are decided by taste\/aroma.<\/p>\n
Anyway, time to get cooking!<\/p>\n
5:30 pm; the beans soaked up their water fairly quickly so I started slicing and dicing and put the first stage together.\u00a0 And now it’s in the pot, simmering.\u00a0 Not all the components are in yet, but the onions, celery, carrot, tomatoes, chiles, all the dried beans, and about half the seasonings (the ones that need to be there at the start) are in.\u00a0 I may need another half carrot in…the carrot\/onion\/celery balance is tricky with all the beans. I’ll give the liquid a sniff-and-taste in another hour.\u00a0 Corn will go in next, and the green beans a little later, but the spinach will wait until much later.\u00a0 I need to slice up all the mushrooms.\u00a0 Tomorrow, most likely.\u00a0\u00a0 It will sit quietly on the tiniest simmer overnight, and everything else can go in early tomorrow.\u00a0 Done by suppertime then.<\/p>\n
Had a good fast walk today while wearing a light pack (camera & binoculars in small backpack, heavy new cellphone in pocket, the backpack is about 6 and a half pounds with that load.\u00a0 But it makes some difference, as if I weighed that much more again.\u00a0\u00a0 It started sprinkling little tiny drops, barely noticeable…but when I stopped and listened, I could hear them hitting the ground in the bare spots, and my clothes were damp when I came in–not sweating at all, just “falling fog” type precip.\u00a0 Lots of little birds in the creek woods as I walked past the east side of it–didn’t stop to extract the binocs and try to see them clearly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s time to make winter soups again.\u00a0 The ingredients for a good hefty winter soup are now in the house, and the beans–which always before I measured only by volume, 4 cups for a full batch in the 12 quart pot–I also weighed, this time.\u00a0\u00a0 One pound, eleven point three ounces.\u00a0\u00a0 Very close to one Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1028,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions\/1028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}