There's still some snow on the ground and the winter coat's are still out. There's still time for soup.
I had some frozen sausage to get rid of and decided bean soup was the way to go. I thought about picking up the standard 13-bean dry mix.
Whole Foods did me one better: North Bay Trading Co.'s 32-Bean and 8-Vegetable Soup/Chili mix. Yes: 32 types of beans, veggies and barley. Take that Campbell's.
The veggies are dehydrated, the beans are dried and there are no added flavors or powders. That means this shelf-stable monster is clean, high fiber, low-sodium and probably fabulous. And one cup of beans makes nine cups of soup.
I'm very excited about this. I'm sick of buying a ton of ingredients to use little bits in a bigger dish, and I'm sick of having soup mixes that contain hydrolyzed soy protein and other bits of MSG misery.
You can scoop and buy as much as you want at Whole Foods in Naperville in their bulk section. So if nine cups of very freezable soup scares you, you can just get enough to try a smaller amount.
If it's awesome, I'll let you know.
hey, I own stock in Campell's, so I use them sometimes :)
How long was the cooking process? I have seen this mix, but I always like preparing my soups from fresh ingredients from my garden, but I was thinking that a mix like this one might be nice to have on hand.
We, too, tend to use stuff we have stock in even if it's not high-end. :) I still love Campbell's bean with bacon.
For the 32-bean mix, you do 1 part mix to eight parts water, boil for five minutes and simmer for 2-3 hours. (I did half water, half chicken stock anad added kale and cooked sausage initially, then tomatoes right before serving it.) They point out that it gets better after time in the fridge or freezer so you could easily make it when you have time, then heat it up again.
I'm suspecting this would be easy to convert for slow-cooker cooking, but I haven't done it yet.
It's really great. The vegetables turned out so normal that I thought to myself, "Wow, I cut these nicely" before remembering it was dehydrated in the mix. And the barley gave it some extra oomph.
I love kale; I've been adding it to everything. (Right now, my slow cooker is working on corned beef and kale. Not sure how it will turn out but I figure kale can stand up to long, low cooking. Long cooking would make cabbage collapse.
I too favor fresh soups when possible, but this was so very, very good and terrible convenient. And to find a soup mix without MSG was awesome.