Chicken and Black eyed-pea Soup

So, my online classes are coming to a close, and the boys are off camping with their father this last week before their mom gets back. M has gone back to her mother's home and B2 has not yet arrived..
So I'm going to try to start getting back and active with this blog.
Tonight I made a very simple soup for dinner. Didn't take a lot of photos because I wasn't sure I was going to be posting this, but, here we are..
Ingredients that went into this soup:

1 large frozen chicken breast, diced
1/4 diced onion
1 quart chicken stock
@ 1 quart of water
1 can stewed tomatoes, diced, plus juice
garlic
Worcestershire sauce

These items were placed into the pot and allowed to come to a simmer, cooking the chicken.

Then I added:
1 cup frozen corn
1 can black eyed peas
1 pint carrots
pepper
basil, sage, or whatever combo of herbs and spices you like. Taste it and adjust as needed

Allow this to come back to a simmer and when everything is heated through, it is ready to serve.

It's a cold and rainy Sunday here, so soup seemed just the thing. And since it's down to just the 2 of us for a few weeks, we're going to try to focus on very simple foods. We'd also both like to drop a few pounds, and soups are a great way to help that along. The are nice and filling, but can be lower in calories because you are filling up with liquids.

Tonight's soup was served with some rolls we had in the freezer. (Hubby's were sourdough, I believe, and mine were Udi's whole grain, gluten free rolls.)

Bean, Beef and Bacon soup

So over the weekend I was rummaging through the freezer and came across some odds and ends of old packets of bacon. Real Pork Bacon. Most of the time, I buy turkey bacon because it is better for us, and, honestly, I've never been much of a fan of pork in general, but, once in a while, we do buy the "real" stuff. Mostly it is when we're in chili making mood, as hubby needs it for his "Man Chilli," a recipe I will have to get from him and post one of these days, but is basically every kind of meat he can think of, lots of spice and NO beans.
But, back to today's recipe. So I have these left over bits of bacon languishing in the freezer. One packet was well and gone and had to be sacrificed to the gods of freezer burn, so I really wanted to do something with the rest of them before it was too late. I have lots of beans, and, well, beans and bacon is good. I had some left over ground beef. Beef and bacon are good together as well. Why not combine all three?!? And so, Been, beef and bacon soup is born. Not a whole lot of pictures today.

I put the beans out to soak last night. I did not take a picture of t his because.. well, soaking beans are boring.  Just put them in a bowl, cover well with water and keep an eye on them. If they swell up and break the surface of the water, add more water. Let sit overnight. I always drain, and replace the water at least once during the soak time. Once you are ready to start making your soup, drain and rinse and place into a pot, cover with water and simmer until they start to soften. I added  half an onion, chopped, to the beans while they cooked. Drain them yet again, and set aside.
For the record, I used Hurst's HamBeens brand 15 bean beef soup bean mix.The beans them selves are naturally gluten free. Here's what the company says about their spice mix:
All dry beans are a naturally gluten free product and every Hurst’s seasoning and spice blend is now 100% gluten free as well (Cajun used to be the exception). Our facility however is not specifically dedicated gluten free as we pack both barley and pasta as well. Please call us with any questions or concerns @ 1-800-HAMBEEN.
So you can use it, or not, as you feel comfortable doing. Today, I used it, but if you don't want to, you can certainly skip it, or use entirely different beans. If you opt to use canned beans, you can skip the soaking and bean cooking steps.
Now, you do have the option of doing this in a slow cooker as well. In which case you'd want to do all of this the night before so you could just assemble and let it do it's thing. I decided to do stove top today, since, honestly, I'm kind of making this up as I go.. which is usually how a lot of my day to day cooking goes.
While the beans are cooking away, you can do your prep for the next few steps. I chopped up about half a bunch of celery and 3 carrots.
Then I chopped up the bits of bacon. I had 2 partial packets, which, combined, gave me almost an entire packet of thick cut bacon. Use what you have or what you prefer. One of the packets was a steakhouse seasoned one which is going to effect some of my seasoning decisions that you might not have to work around.
Once the beans were done and drained, I placed the chopped bacon into the same pot and turned the heat up to medium. Once that was sizzling, I added about a pound of ground beef and let all of the meat combine and brown. Once the meat was done, I added 3 cups of beef broth, the chopped veggies (about 3 cups, combined) and then the beans, which I measured out to be 7 cups, cooked beans. I also tossed in a little corn, maybe a half tablespoon or so of garlic powder, a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce, a good shake of large grind pepper, about a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar (eyeballed) and a can of Italian diced tomatoes.
Cover and let simmer on low.

this is my taste testing bowl. it's really the only way to know how things are progressing.

It's probably not the world's best soup or anything, but it is hearty and tastes pretty darn good on a chill winter's day.  It is simple to make and odds are that most, if not all, of the ingredients are bound to be in most pantries.

1 20 oz bag of 15 bean soup, beef or ham flavored will do, or 20 oz dry beans, assorted, or about 7 c cooked/canned beans
3 cups beef broth
about 1 package of bacon, roughly chopped
1 lb ground beef
1/2 onion
3 carrots, chopped
@2 cups celery, chopped
*veggies can be replaced with 3 cups or so frozen mixed*
1 can Italian diced tomatoes
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
garlic powder and pepper to taste
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

National Homemade Soup Day- Peperoncini Stew

So I hadn't planned on doing another post just yet. It was a rather hectic weekend. My oldest step daughter and her husband went up to Fairbanks for the weekend for a roller derby bout and left our 5 year old grand daughter with us for the weekend. On top of that, my youngest step daughter was home sick with a, thankfully, mild case of the stomach flu, and I'm down with the flu as well, again, thankfully mild and _not_ the stomach bug, just regular old fashioned achey-type flu. So it was bound to be an interesting weekend, and to top it all off, our JRT, Willow, finally passed away Friday night.  She put up a fight right to the end and should have been dead 6 times over just last week alone, but she just didn't want to go until she'd gotten to say goodbye to all the girls, and probably would have held out for my step son if he'd been in state at all. Fortunately, she passed just after the grand daughter had been sent to bed for the night and it was as smooth a passing as she would allow herself to have and is now over that Rainbow Bridge and playing with the three dogs we've had pass before her.
Here's a happier picture of her from a few years ago, doing one of the things she loved best.. playing ball:

She loved chasing that ball....

But, this morning I got up and eventually got online to find that today is apparently national homemade soup day. Oddly, I had already planned on making a "left over stew," so figured, why not go ahead and blog it!

So, today's soup is brought to you today in part by Stephanie O'Dea's recipe from her site A Year of Slow Cooking . I just love her site and have found all sorts of wonderful and easy recipes over there. I had actually run across her site before I went gluten free while looking for slow cooker recipes, but it was such a lucky find. All of her recipes are gluten free, or can be as long as you check your ingredients. We recently made her Peperoncini Beef recipe and had some left overs that I decided would be good to try in a stew. We use it either for a pulled beef type sandwich or serve over potatoes or rice. It can be a bit spicy depending on how strong the peppers you use are.

So, assemble your components:

Red bowl for trimmings for stock, blue bowl for today

I am using up some veggies that are getting a bit old, so about 4 carrots, about 1/3-1/2 a bunch of celery, 2 large potatoes and 1 smallish onion. Give these a good rough chop.

You can see I am using a 2 bowl method. Trimmings are all going in a separate bowl. These will get bagged and stuck in the freezer until I do stock the next time. Just don't put potato or other starchy veggies in here as those will cloud your broth. save those for composting.

I'm also using some garlic, which isn't in any of the pictures, and about half a can of corn and half a can of green beans and, not pictured, a can of diced tomatoes and a few splashes of Worchestershire sauce. This time of year it's not easy to get much variety in our fresh veggies, so canned or frozen are regular staples, and sadly, the growing seasons aren't long enough for the most part to make canning my own for the whole year an option, though I would love to and do what I can when I can. I am using some home made beef stock that I did last month.

Not sure how much of the beef was left, it about half filled this bowl, with a little mashed potatoes in there as well, which is fine for us, because that will help thicken things up.

Once you've got everything chopped, you can choose to do this on the stove top or in a slow cooker. I opted for the slow cooker option. So I've placed everything in the slow cooker: veggies, beef, about 2/3 of the quart jar of stock, some of the liquid from the canned veggies, garlic and some pepper. Give it a good stir to mix things up and since I did this later in the day, I turned it to high so it will cook faster. Really just have to heat things through and cook the veggies.

In the Crock and ready to cook!

So this is cooking away. We might have to tweak the flavor as we go, depending on what your family likes and/or will tolerate :)

The crock I am using is a 4.5 quart one and, as you can see, this fills it pretty well. I am also making more then the 3 of who are here this week could eat tonight, as I want left overs from this for a few days. I'm using as much garlic as my family can stand in this as well. We're battling colds and flu, so we will be doing a lot of soups and stews this week and maybe next week as well. Of course, soups and stews are also very budget friendly and can be made using just about anything you've got in your fridge, freezer and pantry, so you might be seeing them make a regular appearance on here.  In fact, I know I've got one soup recipe that just HAS to be posted, but it has to wait until I can make it again. It is one of hubby's favorites, but I just don't have any pictures of it.. and what use is a food blog without pictures? *laugh*

Ok so, about 6 hours later we have stew. And it's pretty tasty. We're serving it with garlic bread.

So here's the quick rundown of what went n:
4 carrots, diced
about 5 celery stalks, diced
1 small onion, diced
2 large potatoes - diced
1/2 can corn plus liquid
1/2 can green beans
1 can diced tomatoes
a few splashes of Wostershire sauce
about 2-3 cloves garlic, diced
3/4 a quart of beef stock
@ 2 cups left over shredded beef with peperoncini peppers
@1/3 c left over mashed potatoes as thickener

combine and cook til done, either stove top or slow cooker (Slow cooker on high for about 6 hours)

(Oh and don't worry.. we still have plenty of doggie companions to keep us company. We have 4 other little dogs in the household and one of them, Petey, came to help me in the kitchen today, you know, just in case I needed someone to do some taste testing while I was prepping...)