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Today I am sharing a longstanding family tradition- our Ham and Bean Soup Recipe! We usually eat this once a year, on New Year’s Eve, and have for as long as I can remember. However, I brought some of the bean mix back from my parents’ house this year, and when I saw a picture of ham and bean soup on Andrea’s blog a few weeks ago, I knew that I needed to make it!
Ingredients:
- Ham (in the pictures below, I just got 1 pound of deli ham, sliced thickly. Normally my family uses the ham bone from Christmas, uses the ham that falls off the bone in the soup!)
- Bean Mixture (I used dried beans, I just dumped a bunch types into a quart plastic bag (until about 2/3 full). These included the following dried beans: kidney, haricot, pinto, lima (butter), black-eyed, green & yellow lentils, and one other kind I don’t remember.
- Lots of water
- 32 ounces of chicken broth
- 15-20 baby carrots, cut into bite size pieces
- 1/2 an onion
- 1 can of diced tomatoes
- Italian seasoning
- Cayenne Pepper
If you use canned beans instead of dried beans, then there is no need to soak- you can just dump them into the crock pot. Because I used dried beans, I put them in a bowl 24 hours before I wanted to cook them, and covered them with water (plus an additional few inches so they could start to soak the water up).
The mix of dried beans I used. See how much extra room there is in this container? You want that much free space because the beans will grow as they hydrate!
Submerge in a few inches of water
About 6 hours later, I went in to check on them, and added another 2-3 inches of water, as they had soaked up a good amount of the water. I let this sit overnight.
The next day, I put the beans in a large pot with more water and brought to a hard boil, then reduced to about medium heat. I let the beans cook just under 2 hours. You’ll probably need to add more water to the pot as it cooks, so make sure to check in on it occasionally.
During that time, I cut up the ham (if you’re going to use a ham bone, then you’ll obviously through the entire thing in to cook), onion, and carrots, and threw them in the pot, along with the can of tomatoes.
Once the beans were done cooking, I threw them (along with the remaining water that the beans were cooking in) into the pot and added the chicken broth. Like I said, I used a 32 ounce can of broth, then put in another 6-8 ounces of water into that can, swished it around, and dumped that into the crock pot as well.
Finally, I added in the seasonings and stirred everything together. I put the crock pot on high for about 2 hours, and then dropped to low for another 2 hours, and it was complete!
And that’s my family’s ham and bean soup recipe 🙂 It’s how we would ring in the new year as I was growing up, and it’s delicious for the cold winter months and rainy spring months!
Now it’s your turn to share! Do you have a favorite family recipe that you enjoy making today?
Yum!! I’m so glad you made it!!
It was delicious! I’m glad you posted the picture of what you made to remind me to use the beans that I had brought back with me! Happy Monday!! 🙂
Yummy, it is so cold today so that looks fabulous.
It’s such a warm and filling soup, which is exactly what we want on chilly days! Hope you’re staying warm 🙂