I decided I wanted to try making soup from dried beans. I've always been sort of afraid of doing so. We use a lot of canned beans but I worry about the sodium. Plus, dried beans are so much cheaper!
I'm also a big fan of Dollar Tree so I've been keeping an eye out for dried black beans there. They were out for a while, maybe Goya beans got too expensive. But they finally again had 16 ounce bags of Iberia Brand Black Beans. So that was dollar number one.
Dollar number two - at Dollar Tree, no less. A package of "biscuit cut" ham. It turns out that this is was a little package of ham slice odds and ends. Mostly quarter (US coin)-sized. A few bigger. Perfect for putting in soup!
Dollar number three -- Dollar Tree had actual, real bacon. It was a small package (4 ounces?) and it appears to be from Poland. Which makes me slightly nervous. But I decided to try it.
I put the dried beans in a big tupperware bowl, put in about 4-5 cups of water, covered it, and put it in the fridge overnight.
Next morning, I rinsed the beans and then dumped them into the slow cooker. By now, I'm realizing that WOW those beans swell up, so the cooker is going to be completely full if I don't empty out a few beans. So, I wasted a few of the beans, dumping a handful or two into the trash. Next time, maybe I'll just use half the bag of beans.
The ham bits, I just pulled those apart and threw them in with the beans.
The bacon - I fried it up as one does. I took a bite of it, tasted like Ok bacon to me. After cooking, I crumbled it up and added it to the beans.
Then I added random amounts of salt, pepper, red pepper, red pepper flakes, dehydrated onion bits (because I didn't have a real onion handy), garlic bits, and maybe another spice or two that I'm forgetting now.
Then I added water to the slow cooker, just enough to cover the beans, maybe a hair over.
Eight hours later -- bam, we've got good soup. It was actually pretty thick, not very watery at all. My wife used the masher to squish a little bit of it up to make it more liquid without making it more watery. We added a bit of jalapeno hot sauce to spice it up and then ate it for dinner.
It was fantastically good. Very filling. I'm looking forward to having leftover soup for lunch today.
So, this was a cheap and healthy win for us. I think it'll go into our standard rotation. Maybe we'll replace the ham and bacon with some veggies and more spices and make it vegetarian for meatless Monday.
April 13, 2017 at 01:29PM
