White Bean Soup with Kale Recipe

Gardenfork.tv White Bean Soup with Kale Erik: It’s fall here in New England if you couldn’t tell already by the fall shots. We’re going to make a white bean soup today. It’s a really, really simple dish to make and what I like to add to it is some kale and we have a tonic kale. So I’m going to harvest some of this, we have some dried beans we’re going to pressure cook, add some onions and garlic and that’s really it. It’s really simple and it tastes great and that’s a perfect kind of comforty food that you want. When it’s starting to get cold and you go home and boom! It’s there. What I also like, white beans soup is what we need because if you–after your done eating it, you can cook and done a little more and you can mash and make a white bean paste which is really good on sandwiches. So you can have your soup that night and you can make a white bean paste sandwich later on. Len: Hmm paste sandwich is good. Erik: Paste sandwich are very good. White beans paste and some avocado and lettuce and like a nice piece of bread that’s—what more can you want? There you go I love a bouquet of kale. What better way to say I love you? Hey… Len: In my kegs. Erik: This is not food, Henry. Len: It is food. Erik: Well, it’s not dog food. Len: It’s comfort food. Erik: It’s comfort food, yeah. She might like kale, who knows? You can make a white bean soup with either canned beans or dried beans. I don’t have any canned beans with me today but they work really well especially when you are in like a rush, you just throw canned beans in, onions, boom and you’re done. I’ve got one of those bags you get at the grocery store. They’re just white beans. They’re called navy beans or you can also get great northern beans. You know, they’re white beans which I love. So the first thing that you got to do is you have to rinse them because even though they do rinse them at the plant where they package this, every once in a while, you can get a little grit, a little dirt in there or something and that is not quantified into. Bean grit is bad. What we’re going to use is a pressure cooker today. This is my pressure cooker which my stepmother-in-law was very nice enough to buy me. This is called the Magefisa, which is a really nice one. The older ones, I guess had reputation for you know I have this folklore that they blow up or whatever. Well this thing have a bunch of safety features in it. the beauty of pressure cooking is that it cooks foods a lot faster like beans normally you have to soak them overnight and then cook them for an hour and a half or something. The pressure cooker, they’re unsoaked, you put them in here and it’s about 30 minutes. Its 20-30 minutes, depending on the age—if the beans have been around a year that a little more dry, it takes longer to cook. If you soak your beans overnight and put them in a pressure cooker, it takes about nine minutes to cook them. So it’s a really beautiful thing. So you’re going to bring these beans to a boil, turn down the flame and then you’re going to put the lid of your pressure cooker on, turn it and lock it. While our beans are cooking, I’ve got some one onion that I’ve chopped up and we’re going to cook this in some olive oil with some chopped garlic. We’re just going to sauté it really slowly. This can be finished before your beans are. Just turn the heat up, let the olive oil heat up and then put in your onion. Len: Should it sizzle? Erik: Yeah, but I put it in before the—yeah that I screwed up basically. I’ll do the stir shot. All right so perfect world we would sizzle when we put the onions in but I forgot. Just in chopped garlic, I’m not going to put it through the mincer this time because were going to cook it slowly. Okay, so what I did was I cooked the beans out, I cooked the beans for 20 minutes and then I’ve turned the heat off and I let it sip for 10 minutes. Juts let that steam go down. You should read the instructions that come with your pressure cooker about how to cook things and how to open it after you’ve cooked things. I’ve got a calendar with a bowl and I want to save some of the liquids so take this and pour it out. I’ve turned the heat back on in the onions, so onion to a perfect one, kind of golden, goldeny translucent. Pour the beans in. I’m going to take some of this cooking liquid. You can also use chicken stock if you want, vegetable stock. Oh, that’s great. Oh, that’s excellent. If you got them laying around we all like to add is some cheese lines. You know you got your parmesan cheese or your romano because you’re not buying grated parmesan cheese or Romano cheese, right because they taste like card board. I just take the whole rides if you got the black latch, you should cut this off and I add this to the soup. I kind of know a couple of pieces and then you just let this cook. You can let it cook for 10 minutes. You could let it simmer for an hour. Just take these big round pieces. You can even slice off and put some decent cheese on the end and take that and cut it up and throw it in. Because this stuff melts down and it just adds a cheesy creaminess I guess, if that’s what you would call it, to the mix. You know if you like you could pull them out before you serve but I just like to leave and then kind of a happy thing that people find. You know a lot of people they’ll trim the stems of the kale like this. They’ll just take it and cut them like this and they cut it like this, I think it’s a lot of work. What I do is I take the kale and I grab it at the end here then I grab it here and I just pull it up and it comes off like that. I mean it doesn’t have to look fancy. Just grab it and pull it. If you want your kale to be in bite-size pieces, so I just roll it up like this and just cut the ends. Another thing I like to add, you don’t have to add it but I have like an Italian seasoning mix that I buy or it can just be oregano, it can just be murdrum or rosemary you know if you have a rosemary plant, go cut it and throw it in there as well. This makes it Italian, I guess but I don’t know I just like it in there. So this is cooking nicely, I’m going to try not to fall the camera lens this time. I can the cheese is breaking down you know it smells great. I’m just going to take some of these seasoning and put it here. You can put in as little or as much as you like. It’s the eye of the beholder. In goes our kale. The kale I’m cooking about two seconds. I’m going to add a little bit more of the bean water stalk. You can also, if you want as if you have some pesto lying around from the other night or you got a little jar of that stuff you can find in store. Like you put a bowl of the beans down the not pass to the beans and just put a doll at the pesto in the middle of it and then serve it and it’s like—it’s great. It’s just like it’s this green and this bean that it mixes all around and that’s that fall comfort food thing I’m talking—comfort food thing I’m talking about. I think you’ll really like it. So this has been cooking for a little couple of minutes. No big deal. The kale is cooked down it’s at one handed graceful wheeling technique I have. Maybe the kale, I could have cut a little bit more but you know what the heck. But you can see in here, you see those big chunks, that’s the cheese. The cheese rises that just gives at this really unique creaminess, Oh, I’m fogging, fogging. To finish this off, I’m just going to put a little bit of olive oil across the top you know that little drizzle thing like they do in the TV shows. But it really does kind of add a little fresh olive oil of flavor because I don’t have any pesto or anything so we’re just going to take this and take just a little bit like that. Okay so a little bit salt and pepper and we’re ready to taste. All right I should have cut the kale a little bit shorter because it’s really long but what can you do. That’s fall, that’s that. Onion, bean creamy, cheesy, that’s just great and its simple, simple food. That’s what really like it’s just simple to make and people liked it. You can make it beforehand. You can have it for dinner for everybody. The next day it pays even better because everything is kind of melted a little bit. Again, it can be really simple. It could be canned beans, some onions cooked, boom you’re done or it can be a bit more of a long-term thing. Len has just come back from the bar and so she is ready for a taste test. Len: The lot of kale in here. Erik: Yeah I cut the kale a little too big but it’s good for you. Len: It’s good, do you think? Erik: Well, eat that gracefully. It’s good huh? Len: It is good.