Introducing: Michelle, mama of 3 chicks

Hello everyone! My name is Michelle and I will be posting occasionally on Provident Plenty. So you know a little about me: I am a stay-at-home mom of three rambunctious girls ages 4, 3, and 1. My husband and I really love preparedness and self-reliance. My personal recipe book is a compilation of things I can make from our food storage and garden, with few exceptions. I am a whole food believer and money conscious so we do a lot of canning with home-grown or locally grown foods.

Without further ado, I present our most recent successful experiment.

Pumpkin Black Bean Soup
(photo from allrecipes.com and recipe adapted from same website)


Ingredients

3 (15 ounce) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 (16 ounce) can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup butter
1 1/4 cups chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups beef broth
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
Salt, to taste
Cumin, to taste
Coriander (optional), to taste


Directions

Pour 2 cans of the black beans into a food processor or blender, along with the can of tomatoes. Puree until smooth. Set aside.

Melt butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic, and season with salt and pepper. Cook and stir until the onion is softened. Stir in the bean puree, remaining can of beans, beef broth, and the pumpkin puree. Mix until well blended, then simmer for about 25 minutes, or until thick enough to coat the back of a metal spoon.

My comments: This is a great food storage meal for us. We can pumpkin every fall. (See here for information on pressure canning pumpkin. It costs us about $.15 a pint excluding energy costs. http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_04/pumpkin_winter_squash.html) We always keep black beans, usually about 30 jars, in our basement pantry. We buy the black bean cans for $.54 a piece at Aldi. We can tomatos which we either grow ourselves or get from people have too many tomatos. The cost of jars is miniscule since you can reuse jars and we always buy seals for our jars at clearance prices, so probably around $.15 a seal as well. We buy boullion cubes in bulk and use those to create our beef broth. This year we're growing our own garlic.

This soup is delicious. Everyone liked it. It is creamy, the pumpkin is subtle but the cumin is a nice complement to it. You don't taste the tomatoes at all. I know this seems like a really odd combination of ingredients, but try it!