Black Bean and Vegetable Soup with Ham

Last week when it snowed a few inches I had a good time going outside and looking at the big sparkly fluffy flakes. Now, however, the snow and I aren't quite such good friends since it keeps piling itself on my car and sidewalks and then asking to be shoveled. In order to make yesterday's shoveling slightly less painful I rewarded myself with cooking this delicious soup.

We had two Thanksgivings this year, one with a turkey and one with a ham. I was lucky snag a quarter of the ham as leftovers but wasn't really sure what to do with it. You can only eat so many ham sandwiches, right? With this cold weather I knew I wanted to make it into a soup, but didn't know what kind. I dug around for recipes in books and online and decided to take advice from two very different recipes to create my own. The first recipe was for a black bean soup from Simply Recipes (my favorite food blog) that sounded a little spicy, very Californian with avocado and lime, and had a zillion ingredients. The second recipe was from the Joy of Cooking and was actually a recipe for navy bean soup with ham that only had five ingredients. I decided I wanted my soup to end up somewhere in the middle of the two.

I usually try to make substitutions in my recipes to keep them healthy. I have to confess, I cheated on this one and it was totally worth it. All of the recipes that I looked at for bean and ham soup used ham hocks or smoked pork of some kind. I had a fairly lean ham that really lacked the same smokey flavor of a ham hock but I didn't have any liquid smoke to make up for it. I did, though, have **don't judge!** bacon fat. We had cooked a little bit of bacon to go with our breakfast that morning and I hadn't cleaned the pan yet. It just sat there taunting me with it's smoky salty goodness, daring me to use it. And I did. And it was fabulous. I rationalized it by reminding myself that there wasn't much fat in the soup otherwise, and that I usually NEVER do anything like that, and then promptly got over my guilt once I tasted the end result. Don't worry though, if you can't bring yourself to indulge the same way I did. If you're vegetarian or just don't run with a bacon fat crowd, olive oil and liquid smoke can be substituted for the bacon fat and the ham can be left out but you'll need to add some extra salt.

Ingredients

• 1 lb dried black beans
• 5 cups water
  
• 3/4 tsp ground thyme
  
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 2 lbs ham
• 2 large parsnips (they look like white carrots covered in wax, usually near the turnips and rutabagas)
• 1 medium sized sweet potato (NOT a yam! These are white inside, not orange or yellow.)
• 2 medium sized carrots
• 2 tbsp bacon fat

1. Soak 1 lb black beans in a 6-8 cups of water overnight. From what I've read, some dried beans can get stale and soaking too long never hurts. I actually started mine soaking late at night and didn't get to them until late afternoon the next day, so they soaked almost 14 hours and turned out just fine.
2. After the beans have soaked, pour out the water, rinse, and strain again.
   
3. Place them in a 5 qt. stock pot with a thick bottom and add 5 cups water, bay leaves, salt, pepper, thyme, and baking soda.
4. The ham I used had a rind-like skin on the outside that had been glazed (ours was also about 1/4 the size of this one, if that helps!). If your ham also has a darker-colored edge (like the one above), trim it off with a quarter-inch of ham attached to it. If your ham is uniformly colored and textured, cut off 3-4 1/2 inch slices, no more than 1/4 of the weight of the whole ham. Add these to the stock pot.
5. Simmer on low heat until tender. This can take from 1 to 1 1/2 hours. For me it was just enough time to shovel our sidewalks and then prepare the rest of the ingredients.
6. Peel the parsnips, carrots, and sweet potato. Dice them into small cubes. (I recently made soup with my mom and we didn't cut the ingredients small enough so they were too big to eat with the spoon. Try to make these small enough that you could fit 2-3 in a spoon at once.)
7. Once the beans are tender remove the bay leaves and ham trimmings.
8. Heat a large saute pan with 1 tbsp bacon fat or olive oil. Saute the vegetables until they are almost tender enough to pierce with a fork. Leave the leftover oil in the pan, we'll use it later!
9. Add the vegetables to the soup, bring to a boil, then simmer until the vegetables are tender (approx. 15 minutes).
10. Using a large measuring cup (I used my big Pyrex one), scoop 3 or 4 cups of the soup out of the pot. If you have an immersion blender, blend the soup in the measuring cup. If you have a traditional blender, blend the soup in small batches. Since the soup is hot, hold on to the top! Blend until almost smooth. Pour the blended stuff back into the pot and stir.
11. Re-heat the pan you used to saute the vegetables with the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. Dice the ham into 1/4 inch cubes and saute until very lightly browned.
    
12. Add the ham to the soup and allow it to return to a boil.
13. Eat! This would go well with saltines or some crusty french bread, or just on its own.

*Note: This makes a LOT of soup. Freeze half if you can't eat it all right away. It will reheat easily later!