White Navy Bean Soup With Ham Hocks

Pick through beans to make sure there are no stones. Nothing sucks like breaking your teeth on a stone when it should be a bean!

Place the beans in the crock pot; cover with water.

Set on high cooking and cook for an hour.

Now, some of you will argue that we should or should not season the beans because of the skins. Well, it is a moot point here as we are adding something salty to it anyway. Moving right along.

Ham hocks go inches If you cannot find ham hocks, don’t worry. The recipe will be fine. Just throw in a ham bone. No ham bone? You’re killing me here! You could just use a couple slices of ham.

Add your bay leaf to the crock pot. Don’t worry – it will float. No panic. Really!

Hack up the onion, a small dice is fine, toss it into te crock pot.

Mince the garlic, again – you guesed it – into the crockpot. Are you with me so far?.

Hack the potatoes into a medium dice, toss them into the crock pot. You will be needing them to give your soup some body – that stick-to-your-ribs quality. Besides, they are in season.

Set all of that onto 10 hour on low cooking.

Just before serving, remove the meat and bay leaf from the soup. Once the meat is cold enough to handle, shred it up!

Puree up half of the soup with a hand blender. Do it right in the crockpot! Why waste or clean another vessel. If you have dishwashers, then don’t worry about it. If you don’t – you get the idea.

Put the meat back into the soup.

Now is the time to adjust for seasoning. We start off with the lemon juice, then we adjust the salt and pepper in stages.

Taste a spoon full, think about the saltiness or the pepperiness. *I am sure that should be a word!*.

Once the soup is where you would like it to be, ladle it up and serve it with that local artisan bread.

Props to you! You just cooked something easy for Winter.