Budget Recipes, Volume 5: Hot Soup!
Tonight, we’re making a bean soup, minestrone-style.
(Actually, a couple of weeks ago, we’re making a bean soup. This budget recipe series got away from me. Just pretend.)
First, we get out the ingredients and admire them. We have some cheese and crackers to snack on, on the left.
Then we get serious like this:
BEAN MINESTRONE
Servings: 10
Price per serving: $0.89
Half a bag of Bob’s Red Mill 13 Bean Soup Mix: $1.65
Container of free-range chicken broth: $2.49
Small bunch of carrots: $.99
One zucchini: $.89
One medium onion: $.49
Two cloves of garlic: $.08
Half a big can of crushed tomatoes (or one regular, 15-oz can): $1.49
1 Tbsp chili powder: $.50 (?)
Few handfuls of rotini or other pasta: $.35
Salt
You can soak the beans overnight, but if you haven’t, you can also bring them to a boil, drain them, and then just go about the recipe as normal. I think I soaked them.
Boil the beans for about three hours in the broth and about the same amount of water. (The recipe on the package suggests boiling the beans with all water, and a ham hock, which I’m sure is delicious.) Add the onion, chopped, the tomatoes, the chili powder, and the garlic. Cook for about 30 more minutes. Bring a small pot of water to boil on another burner, and cook the pasta. (If you boil the pasta in the soup, it soaks up all the water and makes a gross minestrone stew.) Add chopped-up tomatoes and zucchini to the soup; cook until they are just done. Stir in the cooked pasta. Oh—right. You should have salted it while you were cooking. You should also have tasted for salt. I’m terrible about that. I shake all this salt in at the table instead.
Serve with toast and salad. Grate parmesan on the soup if you want. Soups like this are also good with a spoonful of pesto stirred in, if you have pesto.
My soup looked like this:
Not bad!
I froze some of the leftovers.
There’s something about eating *bean soup* that makes you feel like a hardcore recessionista. (I can’t believe I just used that word. Let’s see if it brings Google hits.)
P.S. My award for the most alarmist sentence about the financial crisis from the entire week goes to Nick Paumgarten, who wrote in his New Yorker ‘Talk of the Town’ piece of this week, “The Pits”:
“The clothes in our closets today will be the ones we’re wearing when we’re old.”
Part I: Caribbean Vegetable Stew
Part II: Baked Apples
Part III: Balsamic Chicken
Part IV: Cheap Homemade Granola
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