Rhapsodies

I had a nice bit of serendipity. I’ve been having one of those oh so entertaining week of being between paychecks and finding myself going a little deeper into the rations then I would like. I’ve had enough of these close calls from college and onward that I always make a point of having at least a gallon of  peas and lentils in my pantry at all times. It get’s the point that whenever I worry about my fiscal status I get a hankering for split pea soup. Unfortunately I hadn’t checked my levels for a while so this time it was down to the beans.

The last time I was down to beans was awful. All I knew what to do with them was boil them and while they sustained I was washing them down with a lot of water. This time it was different this time I had onions and a blender but I wasn’t expecting anything out of it other than extremely dull servings of protein.

But then I remembered I had a bag of chicken bones in the freezer from a batch of my favorite 40 clove chicken recipe that I was saving for stock. So while I was soaking the beans I made stock. On top of this I found a can of steamed tomatoes in the far back of my cupboard. So I added that into my mix. In the end the dull bean porridge I was bracing for myself for turned out to be something excellent.

Here’s the basic idea of what I did, keep in mind there’s a lot of room for finetunig here.

3 cups of dried beans (What I used was half red beans and half great northern beans I’m sure going either way will be fine)

3 medium sized Onions

5 cloves of garlic

Butter

3 tomatoes

fresh thyme

4 cups of chicken stock

4 cups of water

(I actually used a lot more stock then that and no water but the batch of stock I made was rather thin so for the recipe I’m going to call it half stock half water)

Soak the beans for about six hours. Chop the onions, garlic and thyme. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and sweat the onions, garlic and thyme.

remove the skin and seeds from the tomatoes and chop. Add to the saute mix and continue till the onions are soft.

Add Beans and stock, bring to a boil and simmer for an hour. Puree mix. (I did that with the messy tedious process of moving it too the blender cup by cup… I’ve got to get one of those wand thingees)

Let it cook a little longer. Serve hot and enjoy. All in all while this is clearly a work in progress, it came out really well with the tomatoes giving it a certain sweetness.