lima bean soup v. 1.1 beta

Be warned that this is my second batch of soup made from dried lima beans.

I put the approximately 1 lb of dried lima beans remaining from the 30 August 2009 v. 1.0 beta in water to soak last night. Then I noticed that the skins were loosened after the soak and picked out the ones that floated when I ran my hands through them. I then ended up fishing out the skins that floated loose after rinsing the beans and putting them on to boil, so determined to do things differently this time. An alternative would be do cook everything together then run the soup through a food mill, but the idea of extra handling with hot liquids involved was not too attractive.

Peeling lima beans is not quite so decadent as peeling grapes. There was information on the web when I got curious and searched last time. Many of the bean skins broke open on their own and for the rest all that was required was to pinch them and pop the good part out. I fished them out one by one from the soaking water and put the insides into a collander for rinsing and the skins into a container destined for the compost bin.

I put the rinsed beans into the pan with cold water and brought them to a boil. This is the trickiest part of the procedure. The package instructions said to add boiling water to the soaked beans. But then they didn’t mention anything about removing the skins, so suspect the instructions are generic. Next time, v. 1.2, will try adding boiling water because I sure got a lot of foam! After many years the stainless steel, copper bottom stock pot that I found used developed a pinhole leak in the bottom, so I was using a smaller pan that was probably too full.

The “additions” are:

• celery – several stalks and leaves from the inner core diced
• carrot – 2 and a half diced (the rest I grated to add to Bode’s home cooked dog food later)
• onion – about half a cup diced
• a Hungarian wax pepper which had turned red plus seeds sliced/diced
• one dried bay leaf
• freshly ground black pepper

dried lima bean soup cooking

Back an hour later after taking a rest and catching up on email. The soup is pretty much a puree now and the vegetables are cooked. I added my current secret ingredient for making stuff taste good, some of Spagnolo’s Foodland bulk hot Italian sausage. I made it into a patty and baked it a few days ago, then diced it and added the drippings to the soup today.

By the way, Spaggy’s was announcing that the next “madness” sale is on Thursday, November 5 when I shopped there on Monday.