Black Bean Soup
This is not the kind of black bean soup you find at Panera. It is not thick, black, and creamy. It’s more like pork soup with black beans, but it IS really good. We had at least two helpings each at dinner, and the small amount we had leftover was gone within a day I think. I will definitely make it again.
Anyway, I’ll get on with the recipe before my story gets too long-winded:
Ingredients:
- 1/2 tsp cumin
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 green pepper, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 8 oz. can tomato sauce
- 3 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
- 4 slices of bacon, cut into small pieces
- 1 can of black beans
- 2 pork chops, cut up
Directions:
- Put onion, pepper, bacon and pork into Instant Pot and saute until the onion is tender.
- Add remaining ingredients, close the lid and pressure cook for 30 minutes and allow steam to release naturally.
- That’s it. You’re done.
In cooking, there are these things called “aromatics.” They are three or four common ingredients used as the basic flavor profile of most dishes in any given cuisine. They are what gives each region’s dishes their signature taste. In French cooking they use “mirepoix” which is onion, carrot, and celery. In Cajun and Creole cooking it is “The Holy Trinity” of onion, green bell peppers, and celery. In Cuba, it is onion, garlic, and green bell peppers — called “sofrito.”
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Other Latin-American and Spanish cuisines use onion, garlic, and tomato in their sofrito, but in Cuba it is green bell pepper for some reason.
In Ma’s recipe, she had garlic powder instead of fresh garlic, and no green peppers. Why the discrepancy? I don’t know and she’s not around to ask.
But, I like peppers, and I need to make sure I eat my vegetables so I added them in. And I inadvertently ordered 10 heads of garlic instead of 10 cloves of garlic, so in an effort to use up the surplus, I swapped out the garlic powder.
I also deviated a little bit from her instructions, mostly because I can’t help but add my personal style to any recipe I come across.
This recipe was so simple that it took more time to chop all the ingredients than it did to actually cook them. The most labor intensive part of this soup so far has been writing this blog post about it — I mean that literally.
Seriously. So easy, I’ve pretty much said everything I need to say about it. It was so straightforward, I’m now just filling this story with fluff so I won’t have two photos one right after the other.
Eh fuck it. The photos don’t do it justice anyway.
