soup. vegetable soup.

Apparently I'm one step ahead of the game. I made vegetable and bean soup tonight for dinner and then signed online to discover my weekly newsletter from A Splendid Table contained a recipe for...you guessed it...a Tunisian version of vegetable and bean soup.

At any rate, I was milling around the kitchen thinking about what we could have for dinner, pen in hand ready to write a shopping list. I then realized that I had a refrigerator full of vegetables and a cabinet full of beans, so I couldn't really justify buying anything. Put everything in a pot, let it simmer, throw in some stale bread and dinner is served. Keep in mind I use dried beans so the cooking time is longer. By the way, I'm of the firm belief that soaking beans is bullshit. Rinse them, cover them with liquid and simmer until done. It will take a while, sometimes a few hours depending on the bean, but I tell ya..in my 28 years I've never soaked a bean and I'm not about to start. I guess you can't really sound like an old sage at 28. Whatever, you know what I'm saying.

I didn't measure anything, so deal with it! This is what I put in it, and the order it was put in:
vegetable stock
chickpeas
cannellini beans
1 onion
salt and pepper
lentils
2 carrots
swiss chard stems (they take longer to cook than the greens)
stale bread (break it up with a fork once it's submerged in the liquid, if you mash some of the beans don't fret..it will add thickness to the soup)
3 stalks celery
swiss chard greens
celery leaves
rosemary and parsley
a dash of heavy cream
drizzle of olive oil once it's plated

Scott had a good point: it would taste great with ham added. We ate it with some chickpea flour pancakes. A nice hot soup for a cold night in Balestrate. Well not really that cold, about 50 F, but it feels much colder. Soup is always better the next day, so lunch this afternoon was fab.