After all our holiday festivites, I needed to find something to do with our Christmas Eve hambone and the leftover bits of ham. My co-worker, Julie, had brought in a delicious bean and ham soup made from our office holiday party leftover hambone so I picked her brain for a recipe, which really is just a list of ingredients. I pulled my hambone from the freezer where it has been chillin’ (haha) while we were on vacation. I Googled and read a bit out soaking and cooking beans, since I had never done either. Julie suggested getting a 15-bean soup mix so off to Henry’s I went. But all I found there was a 10-bean mix that included both beans that require soaking and beans that don’t require soaking. How the heck are you supposed to deal with that? So instead I grabbed half a pound each of three different kinds of beans…kidney, pinto and black eye peas. I rinsed them and set them to soak overnight.
Before I went to bed that night, I chopped up some celery, carrots and a lot (too much?) parsley. I also prepped an onion and a lot of garlic (I love garlic). I keep onion separate from pretty much everything else once it has been cut into; I’m always afraid of the oniony smell getting stuck to the rest of the ingredients. I know, it’s going to get all mixed up in the soup, but that’s just how I roll.
When it was time to cut up the remaining bits of ham, I had a little help…I’m a sucker for a cute face.
(Don’t worry, I washed my hands.)
The following morning I drained the beans and put them into my crockpot, which has always been way too big for the recipes I usually put in there. Well, not this time as you can see. I set aside the beans for a moment and put in the ham, hambone and veggies…see that, almost full, without ANY beans.
I added in about 2/3 of my beans (I guess a half pound each was a bit much) and then poured the chicken broth into the little remaining space. I then very carefully mixed everything and managed not to fling too many things onto my counter. Such pretty colors.
I set the crockpot to low for 8 hours and went to work. I’ll admit it, I came home on my lunch break to check on the soup. Only once have I had a crockpot disaster where I’d forgotten to add one ingredient (the broth) and burned the entire meal. Since the liquid to solid ratio appeared slightly skewed in my ham bean soup I needed to check on it to satisfy my conscience. It was coming along just fine. I returned to the office and had a delicious dinner ready to go when I got home that evening (after removing the now meatless bones). Clarke even called it epic which if you know Clarke, that is quite a compliment. I’ll have to write a post about the epic tale of Clarke and his use of the word epic.
