Heritage Ham and Bean Soup

I'm entering this soup into the City of Ames Employee Chili/Soup Cookoff tomorrow--wish me luck! (Last year I won healthiest soup with this lentil soup recipe.)

It is one of our families' very favorite soups--if you like ham and beans and you like soup that gets thicker and better when you freeze it, this soup is for you. Enjoy! 

Heritage Ham and Bean Soup

(also known as 5 Bean French Market Soup)

Anastasia Tuckness

From my Great Grandma Katherine Tymes

15-20 servings

6 hours, mostly unattended

2 1/2 cups (16-20 oz) dried mixed beans

3 quarts water

1 tsp salt

1 bay leaf

¼ t dried basil

1 ham hock (3/4 lb)

28 oz can whole tomatoes, broken up

2 medium onions, chopped

6 stalks celery, diced

2-4 cloves garlic, minced

1 lb smoked sausage ring, sliced thinly

½ c fresh chopped parsley, or 1 T dried

½ c red wine, or ¼ c red wine vinegar

1.     Soak the beans in twice the water needed to cover them overnight.  Drain them.

2.     In a large soup pot, combine water, beans, salt, bay leaf, basil, and ham hock.  Simmer 2 ½-3 hours, adjusting the heat and the lid to keep it at a slow simmer (bubbles just barely break surface of soup), and stirring often enough to keep it from sticking (at least every half hour, more if the pan is not heavy-bottomed).

3.     Add tomatoes, onions, celery, and garlic.  Simmer 1 ½ hours, uncovered, stirring to keep from sticking.

4.     Remove the ham hock to a cutting board.  Add sausage to pot. Once the ham hock has cooled, cut off all the meat and add it back to the pot.  Simmer 45 more minutes.

5.     Add parsley and red wine.  Enjoy!

Notes: 

·      +This is a good recipe to start in the morning on a day when you’ll be cooking other things or working around the house, and can just walk by it frequently to check on it.

   +You can use ½ cup each of 5 different dried beans; that's what my mom does. I like to buy the 20 oz bag of mixed beans from Fareway because you get nice big ones and little tiny ones that melt into the soup.

·      +This soup freezes really well and tastes better the day after you make it.

·      +You can purchase a ham hock at Fareway’s meat counter (I get a 1 ½ lb shank cut in half, then use the other half for pea soup—you can freeze the shank for a while) or use a leftover ham bone.  

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Granola / Energy Bars

I fell in love with these bars the first time I made them! I'd been looking for a granola bar that had a little more chew to it, not simply nuts held together with honey and egg white. Well, this is it. It makes a lot and is easily varied, and they hold together well for transporting, and they freeze well too.  Hope you enjoy them, and let me know what variations you particularly like!

Energy Bars

Anastasia Tuckness

based on Granola Bars from Blessedendurance.com (photo at this site)

2 cups regular oats, not instant
½ cup white flour
½ cup wheat flour

2-4 T brown sugar
½ cup wheat germ

½ cup walnuts, sunflower seeds or almonds

½ cup chocolate chips

½ cup raisins or other dried fruit
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt

2 bananas, mashed OR 1 cup applesauce

½ cup peanut butter
1 egg, beaten
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup honey
2 tsp vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 x 13 dish.
2. Combine all dry ingredients (oats through salt) in a large bowl. (The types and amounts of nuts and fruit are quite flexible.)

3. In a medium bowl, mash the banana with the fork. Beat in the egg and peanut butter. Pour in the oil, honey, and vanilla and stir.

4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Stir well.
5. Spread into the pan.
6. Bake for about 22-25 minutes or until the edges begin to brown. Cool slightly, then cut into bars. Store them in the fridge or wrap them individually and freeze them for convenient snacking.

Table Talk--Tim Tebow

Alex and I talk a lot, so here's a little window into one of our heated conversations from this week--

This article (http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2103742,00.html), an opinion piece in Time magazine by Jon Meacham, does a decent job of chronicling Tebow's impact, but the conclusions and inferences he draws made me really mad, particularly this section:


"This cultural Passion play of red-state piety and blue-state scorn is at once familiar and dispiriting. If Christians like Tebow are going to bear witness so publicly, then they ought not to be surprised when they are talked about in ways that require them to turn the other cheek. To insist that criticism of Tebow--even vulgar criticism--is evidence that American culture is hostile to Christianity is wrongheaded."


Really? Seems like hostility to Tebow's Christianity would be pretty good evidence of American culture's hostility to Christianity.


Rick Reilly's piece in ESPN.com (http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/7455943/believing-tim-tebow) was a much more concrete, clear picture of Tebow himself--Reilly actually spent time with him and so he shares stories of Tebow's selfless acts such as the following:


"Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster's), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts."


While most of the media hoopla focuses on the unlikely comebacks of the Broncos or the eerie 3:16 game stats (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/john-316-tim-tebow-bible_n_1195221.html), it's worth remembering that Tim Tebow himself is simply a Christian who is trying his best to live his life and do his job to the glory of God, and sometimes that means lots of throwing practice, sometimes it means praying before a game to get his priorities straight, and sometimes it means spending time with terminally ill people. At the end of the day, I think he's doing the right thing.

Easy Potato Soup in the Crockpot

This is one of my favorite soup recipes--it's easy, most people like it, and it makes a lot. I make the recipe from my Betty Crocker's Slow Cooker Cookbook; I've put the link below to the same recipe on the Betty Crocker website. (The picture is from there as well.)

The main ingredients are hash brown potatoes, canned corn, and evaporated milk. I sometimes use shredded hash browns instead of the cubed kind. It calls for bacon; I usually use chopped up cooked ham to give it more substance.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Find the recipe--click here.

Grand Prize Zucchini Skillet Recipe

Simple, tasty, and a great use for summer garden produce--this one's a repeater.

It's a recipe I've had in my "possibilities" binder for years, and I should have made it years ago! It tasted much better than I thought it would given the ingredients. It must be the freshness of the vegetables--and the marvels of highly salty soy sauce and garlic powder, probably. It came out of a cookbook that focused on lentil recipes and I love the recipe title. (Unfortunately I cannot find the original source. Nor did I think to take a picture. Sorry!)

Alex actually did most of the cooking on this one which gives you an indication of its simplicity.

Grand Prize Zucchini Skillet

45-60 minutes total

5 servings

1 cup dried lentils, rinsed

2 cups water

1 onion, chopped

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

2 medium zucchini, sliced

2 medium tomatoes, sliced

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1 medium onion, sliced (opt.)

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1 Tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1. Cook the lentils in the water (covered) for 30 minutes. Drain.

2. Saute the chopped onion in the oil in a large skillet.

3. Add the cooked lentils and the zucchini to the skillet and saute for 5 minutes.

4. Add the tomatoes and sprinkle on 2/3 cup of cheese.

5. Arrange the onion slices on top of the cheese (this onion is optional) and sprinkle with the remaining 1/3 cup of cheese.

6. Sprinkle the seasonings over the vegetables. Steam, covered, until the tomatoes are tender.

Nutritional info per serving: 222 calories, 13g protein, 21g carbs, 10g fat, 24g chol, 170mg sodium, 6g fiber

Ingredient notes: We did not use the sliced onion since we don't care for raw or almost raw onions. The amount of vegetables is flexible as well-we used what we had that day. For soy sauce, we use Pearl River Soy Sauce from the Asian food store--our Mongolian renter bought it last year and we love it.

Basic Granola

This is the granola I made frequently while growing up, and it's the granola I make about twice a month now. I make it 12 cups at a time in a large roasting pan because Alex and I each eat 1/2 cup of it every morning for breakfast, often with homemade yogurt, so we go through it quickly. As the title mentions, this is the most basic recipe I use. We (I) do occasionally get bored with it so I have a maple version and a peanut butter version as well. I enjoy making granola because it ensures that every day we can have an easy, inexpensive, and healthy breakfast that will carry us through our mornings. I hope you enjoy it!

Granola

Adapted from the More with Less Cookbook

Anastasia Tuckness

12 c oats

1 c honey

1 c vegetable oil

1 c wheat germ (opt.)

1 c walnuts

Additional nuts or dried fruit as desired

Several good shakes of cinnamon and salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 while you measure oats.

2. Toast oats in oven 8 minutes.

3. Stir in wheat germ, walnuts, cinnamon, salt.

4. Pour honey and oil over; stir well.

5. Bake for 8 minute intervals, stirring after each one and checking for desired doneness.

6. Cool on rack.

7. Mix in other cereals such as Grape Nuts and All Bran and dried fruit.

Chippy Oatmeal Raisin Bars

These bars have always been my standby when I need something basic to have around the house for desserts and snacks--I almost always have all the ingredients in the house and they take 15 minutes to whip together. I found the recipe on the back of the raisin box when I was in middle school. Until recently, I didn't bring them to potlucks because I thought they were too plain--yummy for home, but too basic to share.

Last Saturday I brought two pans to work to share because we had a big project going on and we needed fast fuel to keep us going. Turns out these bars were exactly the right thing--enough sweetness to make them fun and easy to eat, enough solid energy calories (oats, raisins, etc) to keep you going on a long day. I hope you and your friends enjoy them as much as we all did!

Chippy Oatmeal Raisin Bars

from the back of the raisin box

15 min prep + 25 min bake

1 c brown sugar

¾ c butter (1 ½ sticks)

2 eggs

1 ½ t vanilla

¾ c flour

1-2 c chocolate chips (I use about 1 1/2 cups usually)

2 c oats (I use rolled; quick oats work too)

¾ c raisins

1. Beat sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla. Add flour slowly.

2. Stir in chocolate chips, oats and raisins. Spread in lightly greased 9x13 dish.

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.