Ham and Bean Soup with Green Chile

When I was growing up, one of our regular family dishes was a sort of soup made with a ham bone and some chopped up ham and butter beans. I'm not sure what my mother seasoned it with, except probably more salt. But, I didn't particularly like it, perhaps because the main flavor was the beany taste of the butter beans.

Beans are an excellent and cheap source of protein. But, they are not a good source of all nine of the essential amino acids (which your body cannot synthesize from other foods like carbohydrates or fats). You can complement them with nuts or a grain like oats or quinoa.

But, commonly they are combined with fish or a meat product like ham to give you a complete, high quality protein source in your diet.

A good tip for beans is to season them with cumin, which adds its own flavor and neutralizes the characteristic bean taste. So, I try to use it in most of my dishes with beans.

This is really a two part recipe. First, I'll give you a simple recipe for cooking up dry beans for use in other dishes. Then, we'll add the ham and other ingredients to make the soup!

Basic Chile Beans

1 pound dried beans, such as pinto, black beans, Great Northern, etc.
water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp ground chile, such as Chipotle or Sandia Red

1. The key to cooking good beans is to soak them properly first. So, rinse the beans 2 or 3 times to wash off any dirt. Then put them in a large pot and cover with water about 2 inches higher than the beans. Cover the pot and soak the beans overnight.

2. The next day, dump the rinse water and cover the beans again with water. Put the pot on medium-high heat.

3. Add the salt and spices. Stir the mix together and heat the beans until they come to a slow boil. Reduce the heat to medium or medium-low so that they are boiling slowly and steadily.

4. Cover the pot with a lid and let the beans simmer for about an hour and a half. They should be tender, but not mushy. They also should not be mealy, with a harder, courser texture. Generally, this comes from not allowing enough time for the beans to soak.

5. Generally, I drain off all the cooking water and set it aside for use as a broth. (I like to put a little on my dogs' food when I feed them!) Then, you can keep them in a container in the refrigerator for a week or so and take out one or two cups at a time to use for various dishes.

6. However, for tonight's soup, only drain off about half the liquid so that you can see the liquid among the beans in the pan.

Ham and Bean Soup with Green Chile

1 whole recipe of Basic Chile Beans (you can scale this down if you wish)
1 pound ham, cut into small chunks (use a bit more if you like)
1 ham bone (if available)
1 large onion, diced
1 14 ounce can diced tomatoes
1 7 ounce can mild diced green chiles

1. Cut as much ham as you can off the bone. Add the bone to the beans. Add the diced onions and stir them into the beans.

2. Cut the ham into chunks and add to the beans and onions.

3. Add the diced tomatoes and green chiles. Rinse the cans with a little water and add this to the soup.

4. Heat to a slow boil again, and simmer for about 3-4 hours. It actually should be ready to eat in about an hour. But, the flavor will develop better if you let it cook longer.

Enjoy it with a flour tortilla or a hard roll for dipping in the soup.

A good salad or cole slaw goes nicely with this, as well.

Twice Baked Yukon Gold Potatoes

It's Friday night and time to relax as I slip into the weekend. Since I gained weight yesterday despite going for a walk and doing my calisthenics, I got more serious today and skipped all the sweetened drinks.

And when supper time arrived, I wanted something light but didn't feel like poking through the leftovers (which are plentiful).

So, I found a recipe for Twice Baked New Potatoes and decided to tweak it a little for my own preferences.

Ingredients

6-7 Yukon Gold potatoes, about 2-3 pounds
1/2 cup sour cream
1/4 cup diced green onions
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp smoked paprika
3/4 cup shredded medium cheddar cheese
2 slices bacon, diced and fried till crisp but not dry

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 425 F. Scrub potatoes thoroughly with a brush. Mine weren't quite as new as when I bought them from the vendor for a local farm, but they still had dirt on the skin. Fortunately it had dried and washed off easily with just water. Pat dry with a cloth or towel and wrap the potatoes in aluminum foil.
2. If there is a large size difference, put the largest potatoes in the oven first and set the timer for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, add the rest and reset the timer for another 45 minutes. Take the potatoes out and check one of the large ones for doneness. Mine were still a little hard, so I kept the small ones out and put the large ones back in the oven for another 10 minutes.
3. Cut a slice off the top of each potato. Peel the skin off this slice and put the potato in a large metal bowl for mixing. Discard the skin. Using a melon baller or small ice cream scoop, remove most of the potato from the middle and add it to the bowl. If any potatoes had to cook longer, take them out and do the same with them.
4. Using a potato masher or electric mixer on low (I actually used my pastry blender), gently mash the potato pulp. Add the sour cream, green onions, mustard, salt, paprika and blend into the mashed potatoes. I used a wooden spoon for this step. Then add 1/2 cup of the grated cheese and blend it in as well.

5. Set the scooped out potatoes on a baking sheet. Spoon the mashed potato mixture into the potato shells. Place them in the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes.
6. Sprinkle the remain cheddar on top of the potatoes and bake for another 3 minutes to melt the cheese.

7. Top with the bacon bits and enjoy with a light side salad or cole slaw. Our recipe uses a boiled vinegar and oil dressing, which lasts much longer than the more common mayonnaise dressing and saves on the fat!

We especially enjoyed these. I'm glad I decided to use green onions instead of the chives, because they gave a nice onion flavor to the potato filling. Also, the cheddar cheese and paprika added a slightly darker color to the natural yellow color of the potatoes themselves.

And, my exercise app estimates the total calories for the whole meal at less than 400!

Certified Job Hunter

It's been a busy summer and I haven't written up a post for longer than I had realized.

As I mentioned in one of my first blogs, I have been going back to school to update my computer skills. I was only attending part time so that I could work and continue my class schedule. Fortunately, things have come to fruition and I completed the series of courses from Cisco, who makes about 80% of the switching and routing equipment that connects computers together.

This prepared my to take the exam to qualify as a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), the entry level for working configuring and managing this equipment. And, after two tries and untold hours of study, I passed the test and now have a certification to put on my resume to show, "Look! See! I really can do this!"

Hence, I am now spending lots of time poking over the results of computerized job searches and applying for a job to start working and put those skills to use.

I can't pretend to have really figured out the modern job market. But, at least all those internet web sites let me look for jobs across several states without spending huge amounts of money and time on the road.

And, searching for a job as a "network engineer" gets results that are better targeted than looking for jobs working with computers, which is pretty much everything these days. But even something like "technical support" can turn up some weird results.

For instance, did you the know that the person who cuts, shampoos and styles your hair (otherwise known as an Associate Salon Designer ) is really working in technical support?

Or, if you're looking for a Computer, Information Technology and Mathematical Job, perhaps you'd like to work for commission as a Lady's Shoe Sales Person? Of course they have to check my email address every time I visit, so it helps to be a little bit tech savvy. Maybe I should have gone to cosmetology school?

And, another one that showed up from one of my searches was a Sephora Product Consultant. I noticed from the job descriptions that, if you work your way up to Sephora Senior Education Consultant, you will need a working knowledge of Microsoft Word which was part of one of my classes.

And, although it may seem so, I'm not trying to poke fun at the people who spend long hours working in these jobs. I need and use their services myself and have spent several years working in retail.

I think primarily it's just a symptom of the vagueness of word search algorithms. And, it's probably better to err on the side of including things the person searching is not looking for rather than leaving out things which they are seeking.

But, it would be nice if the job posting sites could be more specific about the job requirements and let you  focus your search a little bit tighter! It certainly seems feasible from all the questions you have to answer when you actually apply for a position.

Lest you think I have been starving all summer since I haven't posted any recipes, here is my breakfast special this week.

When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I learned to make biscuits and gravy by helping my grandmother roll out the dough on the counter in her kitchen and cut the biscuits with a circular cutter. Of course, that meant there was left over strips of dough from between the circles you cut out. This dough had to be reshaped and rolled out again for cutting.

But, thanks to the power of geometry, we know that a hexagon is a very efficient space-filling shape. So, with this Stainless Steel Hexagon Cutter, you can cut out six biscuits at once with no in-between strips! (There's still the strip around the edge, though.)

So, Monday morning I got ambitious (or perhaps just more interested in cooking than in reading about Microsoft Server 2012) and mixed up some baking powder biscuits with the recipe from my Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook.

Meanwhile, I browned some sausage and made a little basic white gravy with butter, flour, milk, salt and pepper. I liked the results and one of my sons must have agreed, because he finished off the leftovers!