Recipe Box Project

I tried to make this recipe in time for the snowstorm that blanketed all of my American friends over the weekend, but alas, as I am no weatherman, I didn’t make it until Sunday and have been sitting on it ever since, unsure of what to say about it.

I’ve been excited about this soup for weeks.* In the throes of the Holiday Almanac project, when all I wanted was to cook something that wasn’t a dessert, the thought of this soup sustained me. ‘Just make it til January,’ I told myself, ‘and then you can eat garbanzo soup stewed with a ham hock and a pinch of saffron, spiced with chorizo and a whole lot of herbs, delicious and hearty and warming and cosy.’

But then I made the soup (first step: determine where to procure a ham hock in this town), and it was only… well, meh. The first round of it included a dried chorizo sausage, which, upon being boiled in soup, rendered all of its fat, leaving the broth oily and tasteless. The chorizo, though, was optional, so I tried again sans chorizo, with extra garbanzo beans and less potato, and even threw in a handful of greens I had on hand, and the result was super tasty.

So I’m including the second version below—it’s tasty and since it needs to simmer for several hours, it’s a perfect weekend dish when you can fire up the slow cooker or put a pot on a low simmer, then wash all the dishes you dirtied while prepping it. By the time it’s ready, your kitchen will be sparkling, and, if you’re anything like us, you can curl up with a steaming bowl of soup, a glass of red wine, and a new episode of the X-Files while you watch snow flurries tumble by the window onto the street below.

*I feel it's only fair to tell you that at least 40% of my excitement over this soup came from the fact that the first ingredient literally says '1 pound dried garbanzos,' and then has a tiny arrow with a note that reads 'they look like tiny hazelnuts.' I just love the idea that you might not know what chickpeas are, but you DO know what a hazelnut looks like. What?

The verdict:

3 spoons out of five. It’s delicious (when made as below), but I’m deducting 2 spoons for the fact that the first version of the recipe required me to boil a chorizo. Plus, I have really high soup standards. But major props to this soup for filling the house with an amazing roasted pork smell, and also for making so much soup that I will likely never have to make soup again. I’ve frozen half of it (a solid 4 servings), and still have enough left for 4 hearty servings. Make this when you want a cosy winter meal that’s low maintenance, tasty, and filling—aka every time you’re stuck in the house during a snowstorm.

The recipe:

Garbanzo Bean Soup

the directions:

Wash beans, then soak overnight.
Wash well the next morning, then set aside.
Place the ham hock in your crockpot or a large saucepot, then cover (barely!) with cold water.
Add beans and start cooking slowly over low heat.
Meanwhile, cut up onions, garlic, and green pepper and saute in olive oil until just softened.
Add sauteed veggies, bay leaves, and saffron to the pot and continue cooking slowly.
When beans are al dente (after several hours in a crockpot or a couple hours over low simmer), peel and chop the potato and add it to the pot.
Turn heat to high and allow to simmer until potato is cooked.
Season with salt and pepper and let simmer until thickened, adding water if liquid levels get too low, but remember that it should be very thick.
Once potatoes are cooked and beans are tender, serve with a nice glass of red wine and enjoy!

the ingredients:

1 pound dried garbanzo beans (chickpeas), make sure to use dried beans and not canned
2 pound ham hock
4 large onions
2 cloves of garlic
1 green pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
2 bay leaves
Pinch of saffron threads
1 large potato
Salt & Pepper to taste

The first time I ever had venison was when a German friend of my mom's made roast venison and gave a huge portion to my mom... who then lied to me and told me it was roast beef to convince me to eat it. I always thought it was hilarious that she felt the need to lie about it, because it didn't even faze me: that deer was delicious. But then I went another decade without having venison again until I moved to Scotland, where it's as ubiquitous on most restaurant menus as pork. Here in Scotland, venison is everywhere: in pies, soups, casseroles, and served by itself. But despite the fact that I have eaten it a few times a year ever since moving here, I had still never cooked it until I stumbled upon this recipe (which can easily be made with beef, if you're wondering). Although I can't imagine Eleanor making this recipe with venison (where would you get venison in Central Florida?), I could totally see her making it with beef. It's got a great old-fashioned sounding list of ingredients, with mostly traditional herbs and spices and a few odd ones thrown in (looking at you, paprika and cranberries), and it totally seems like the kind of thing you'd expect your grandparents to serve you when you come over for a visit.

You didn't believe me about the ron swanson thing, did you?

I've been excited about making this recipe ever since I first spotted it in the box. It's a recipe from a 1977 issue of Better Homes & Gardens, and, as an avid soup lover, I was stoked. I saved it for the first day of fall, so I could post it in honour of the changing of the seasons and the fact that soup weather is finally on the way!

I mean, Better Homes & Gardens vets their recipes, right?

And this one is from a NASA chef who planned the meals that went into space, so you'd really think he knew what he was doing, right?*

And said chef looks just like Ron Swanson, which has to be a good thing when it comes to meat, right?

And the recipe is based on a 'colonial kitchen' classic in honour of the American Bicentennial, so... really, you'd think it would be good, right?

RIGHT??

I had high hopes for this: I love the way soup makes the whole house smell great, I love having easily-frozen leftovers that can be re-heated on cold autumn nights. But here is the thing about writing a cooking blog: it throws a lot of curveballs your way, and this recipe was one of them.

First of all, the quantity of water listed in the recipe was drastically incorrect. The liquid, which you're supposed to be able to use to make a venison broth, boiled off completely in less than half of the time it was supposed to simmer, so the meat burned to a char and nearly caught our kitchen on fire. As it was, the kitchen reeked for a full three days after we made this.

But, having no choice but to continue, I removed the charred pieces from the meat and continued with the recipe.

Enter disaster number 2: the cranberries.** In the image that accompanied this recipe in BH&G, there are clearly cranberries floating in the bowl of soup. But as soon as my cranberries heated up, they burst and then completely dissolved. Which would have been fine, except have you ever tasted a cranberry? They're hella bitter, and the 2 tbsp of sugar that the recipe calls for was nowhere near enough to overcome this. I ended up doubling the sugar and easily could have doubled it again to try to cover up the bitterness that ran through every drop of the soup because of how the cranberries dissolved.

Oh yeah, the original also called for 'julienned matchstick celery.' So there's that.

But hear me out: these two things are fixable. And in the recipe below, I've fixed them. So the soup, made according to the below, is delicious, and totally worth it. So the next time an autumn rainstorm blows into town and you just want to snuggle up with a blanket and a bowl of soup, consider this one. It's hearty and filling without leaving you feeling like a bag of wet cement (like potato soup always does), and, if you make it as per the below, your house will smell awesome. Plus, if you have a loved one who is anything like mine, this soup is a sure way to their heart.

*This recipe is also from a regular BH&G feature from the 1970s called 'He Cooks,' which featured only 'masculine' recipes that 'men like to cook.'

**The most heartbreaking part of the cranberries going awry is that I used cranberries from my stash to make this! Cranberries are pretty hard to find here in Scotland, so every winter I buy as many bags as I can convince Judson to allow me and freeze them for year-round baking. And I wasted a whole cup of my stash on what turned out to be a veritable disaster.