Soup, Soup and More Soup

I love 15-bean soup, but my guy doesn't. His mother forced him to eat split pea soup as a kid, and it left him scarred or something over any soup with beans or peas in it. Anyway, with Kat gone I haven't made it because there is no recipe for a one- or two-serving soup. I miss it, though, so I decided to make a batch and freeze what I couldn't eat.

I make an evolved version of my mom's bean soup; This recipe is pretty close to what I do. Mine is basically a large package of Hearst Has-Beans, lemon juice, diced onion, diced celery, diced potato, a medium can of tomato sauce and a small can of shoepeg corn. I simmer the beans by themselves for an hour, drain the pot (discarding the water also gets rid of what causes gas), add in ten cups of new water and everything else and cook on a very low heat for six hours. Also I don't use the seasoning packet that comes with the beans but throw in my own herbs, usually thyme, rosemary and some black pepper.

The end result is very filling, freezes well and is quite tasty. A nice meal with homemade biscuits.

Comments

nightsmusic said…

I made the Hurst Beans mix once. I didn't care for it at all. The seasoning packet made it taste very...odd. We each had just a little bowl to taste it and I tossed the rest. It was disappointing. I thought about using the bean mix without the seasoning another time, but we do green bean soup a couple times in the winter and really prefer that to a dried bean soup. :)

July 22, 2021 at 5:09 AM

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

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