Friday, January 13, 2012

A bean recipe--and lots o' links--for the recipe file

I am always looking for more ways to use beans, and my family loved this one for taco soup over at Marie's Cooking Adventures (Yeah. No, that's not me, but I like the name... :).

It's wonderful what you can find when you go blog-hopping. Almost the entire family loved this soup. The only thing I had to change wasn't really a change--I followed the recipe as stated, and you really couldn't get any easier. I cooked it on low, but when I checked it about an hour before we were supposed to eat, it tasted really salty to me. To be fair, I had two of my children taste it as well, and they didn't think it was too salty, but I peeled and cut up a couple of potatoes and dumped them in  for the remainder of the cooking time, because doing so is  supposed to help remove excess salt.  I removed them before serving, and  the soup didn't taste too salty to me anymore, so it was all good. If I had been on the ball, I would have just cooked some black beans on my own and added those, because I wouldn't have added salt, and perhaps the seasoning packets I used were saltier than some others or something... In any case, this soup was an absolute hit here, and uses mostly canned foods, and I have wondered if you could just use canned chicken if you wanted instead of the ground beef (we used ground turkey) and then it would be an entirely pantry-friendly recipe. I highly recommend it. It has gained a place in the coveted recipe rotation. So many, many thanks to Marie for the recipe!

And now, at the risk of future posts, I am going to list some links to other recipes that caught my eye while I was doing some aforementioned blog-hopping. I haven't made them yet, but they look wonderful, (and ok, let's not forget that they also look like they would be easy to try, in most cases) and sometimes I just want to share what I've found sooner than it takes to actually make them.  Another one on the same blog is here  for Southwest Chicken Egg Rolls. (A little trickier, I guess, for just food storage, but I am thinking canned chicken, canned corn, and the cheese and frozen spinach might just to have to be freezer storage unless someone else has a suggestion... :) I actually found Marie's Cooking Adventures via

-- Cupcake Diaries, which also happens to have the recipe for the soup-I-am-most-likely-to-make-next-in-my-crockpot, aka Slow Cooker Ham and Potato Soup . This just looks really good to me, and combine the ease of a crockpot, a use for any potatoes that are lonely in storage (which I don't have currently, but have in the past and expect to have in the future) and it's all win-win-win. I would suggest checking out this recipe and others while you are there--you might find something else you would like as well. Thanks Cupcake Diaries!

--And of course, I check out the Harried Homemaker site regularly, and the recipe for chicken soup found here looks interesting. True confessions: I don't recall ever having cooked with parsnips before. But this recipe might convince me to start, seeing as how it is supposed to help you get over sickness and looks delicious in the pictures. It apparently is rather work-intensive, but soup that acts like an antibiotic might be an incentive for many people... In any case, talk about blog-hopping potential: beneath this recipe are links to 63 more soup recipes--thanks Harried Homemaker!

So, thanks again to the wonderful people who share over at Marie's Cooking Adventures, Cupcake Diaries, and Harried Homemaker! You make adding new recipes into the rotation during the New Year all that much easier... :)

  

3 comments:

Kristen said...

Thanks for the mention! I am going to go visit the other blogs you mentioned. I love recommendations from friends!

Unknown said...

Thanks for the Cupcake Diaries!! I really appreciate it! :)

Marie said...

Kristen--Thanks again for the soup recipe and all the great recipes you provide--yours is a site I can always highly recommend. And thanks as always for your comment!

Alli-Glad I came upon your website blog-hopping--thanks again for sharing the soup recipe!