Cold Blooded

Oh, Egypt, I'm so much warmer there! 

Yes, I am a cold blooded creature, I love my hot summer days around the world. Snow is a plague upon mankind and I can't wait until it's warm again to run outside like a maniac. So when I get days like this when I'm shivering outside of the coffee shop, wearing a sweatshirt, and realizing it's in the upper seventies, I'm cranky.

Well it doesn't hurt I'm only 2/3rds the man I used to be after my first Camino.



But still! I despise the cold and everything related to it! So as I sip my coffee, thinking of warmer days elsewhere (camp, Camino, Egypt, Turkey, etc) I will enjoy the fact for a rainy couple of days I gorged on some homemade bean and bacon soup.

Bean and Bacon Soup

Tools:
Larger Slow Cooker (mine's 5 quarts)
Cupping Board
Knife
Spoon
Large Bowl

Ingredients:
2 large onions
1 lb of bacon (if your local supermarket discounts meat, learn their schedule and pick up a pack of bacon right as it goes on discount, I pay about 50cents a lb that way and then just freeze it until I need it)
2 large carrots
1 bag of dry northern white beans
High quality H2O from your tap

The trick with slow cookers is speed, you want things to cook slowly throughout the day, but you need to act fast whenever the lid comes off so the food doesn't get too cold. Slow cookers will make any food you cook in them nice and tender, but you need to remember they take a long time to cook anything so you'll need to start the day before usually when cooking something.

First thing you will want to do is turn on your slow cooker to low to start warming it up. Dice up the onions, carrots, and bacon (cutting half frozen bacon is a lot easier than trying to cut it up raw) into small bits, and add into the slow cooker. Put the lid onto the slow cooker and let it cook for an hour to caramelize the carrots and onion slightly, mixing every 30 minutes to make sure nothing burns.

Pour your beans into the large bowl and sift through them, looking for anything that doesn't belong. Modern harvesting is very, very efficient in removing all sorts of things that used to be found in bags of beans (like small rocks), but occasionally one will slip through. It won't hurt you to cook the rock in the soup, my Granny Miller always told me it was lucky when you found one in your bean soup, but it is a surprise you don't want to suddenly bite down on. Rocks are really easy to see in the beans, they'll be a lot darker than the white beans and you can pick them out easily if they are there. (I've not found a rock in the last five years of making all sorts of bean soups, but I could be very lucky as well).

Pour the beans into the slow cooker and then fill the slow cooker with water up to an inch from near the top. Put the lid back onto the slow cooker and leave it alone for 14-24 hours, stirring occasionally every 6 hours or so. And that is how you make an easy bean and bacon soup. I usually serve mine with either corn bread (if I'm feeling productive) or with oyster crackers (the usual lazy when I make this meal). I hope you stay warm and until next time.

Bien Camino.