In this Feed Your Fire podcast episode, we wind down from a long, indulgent weekend in Mexico and a full plate at Thanksgiving to warm, cozy comfort and the simplicity of a pantry staple easy bean soup as we replenish ourselves from the inside out and embrace mindfulness.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm Kim Baker, founder of Kim Baker Foods. It is the week after Thanksgiving, and I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. After what tends to be a bit of a whirlwind, we're going to settle in and take a deep breath. We can only relish what's good when we have our energy reserves. So get comfortable as we enjoy a bowl of soup and replenish from the inside out.
The holidays are such a wonderful time of gathering, but they can leave you depleted. Anyone feel a little exhausted from it all, right? Before Thanksgiving, my boyfriend and I took a trip, a much anticipated and deferred trip to Mexico.
Festive Mexican music plays.
That soundtrack about sums it up. We ate, we drank, we danced, we explored. It was a blast, and we got back just in time to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with family. And it was a fabulous trip, but that sequencing looks better in your mind than it feels in reality. And by the time Black Friday rolled around, I could barely get out of bed. I was spent feeling the pressure of my email inbox filling up with these limited time sales and the Christmas holiday around the corner.
It reminded me that the same level of attention that goes into our planning for these wonderful moments in life should also be applied to a degree to our recovery, so that we can actually enjoy our experiences. If you're one of those people that don't really know how to relax, this is very good time to practice. There was a time in my life where that type of spirit—that chaos, if you will, had an allure. Maybe that was a function of youth and my inexperience with time's transience, or maybe I was compelled to move and didn't really appreciate the depth of feeling that comes from being still.
In my previous quests for more more and more, I was missing so much. So today, we're anchoring. We're settling in. We're getting cozy. We're putting our Snuggies and our slippers on, and we're going to make soup from some basic pantry staples.
This recipe couldn't be simpler. That's by design, and it comes without a taste trade-off. It's delicious, and I think you're going to love it.
Okay, so dig into your pantry and pull out a can of beans. We're using cannellini beans. I want you to drain out the liquid in the can, but to do so kind of sparingly, we don't want all of that starch to be lost. So open up the can, pour out any liquid that's kind of at the surface. You can give it a little bit of a rinse, but don't be thorough. I want you to do a very bad job rinsing them.
Now, set that can aside and chop some onions on a cutting board. Heat up a small saucepan on the stove and add in a little bit of olive oil. Then add your onions to the hot pan and let them saute. Once your onions are soft and translucent, add in a clove of finely chopped garlic and some red pepper flakes. If you happen to have any rosemary left over from Thanksgiving, chop it up and add it to the pan as well. Then we're going to add in about three quarters of the can of beans and about three cups of chicken or vegetable stock. Take the remaining beans that are in the can and using a fork, just sort of smash them up. We want to create kind of a paste and. Then throw that in the pot as well. This will help thicken the soup and give it a bit of a creamy texture. Throw in a bay leaf, if you have one, and season with salt and pepper. Let this all cook together for maybe 1015 minutes.
While that's cooking up, we're going to prepare some greens for the soup. My favorite green to use here is fresh escarole. It's like a head of lettuce, essentially. It can be a little bit hard to find. I only can find escarole in maybe one or two of our local grocery stores, but there's plenty of other greens that are great substitutes. Spinach is probably my second favorite. I prefer the fresh greens versus the ones that come in the plastic clam shell. So if you can get your hands on a bunch of fresh spinach, that would be second preference.
If you're using fresh greens, you're going to need to wash them thoroughly. So while your soup is cooking, this is when I prepare the greens—just washing them in the sink, leaf by leaf, and then I give them a rough chop. Since this is a pantry recipe, feel free to use some frozen greens that you have on hand. If fresh greens feel a little bit like too much effort. Throw your greens into the pot, and we're just letting them wilt and warm up, and then we're turning off the heat. Taste it, see if it needs any more salt and pepper, and add in a generous amount of Parmesan cheese.
This makes a small pot of soup. So feel free to double or triple the quantities to make a larger pot. I like to eat this soup, as is, with some toasted bread on the side. Feel free to add in some pasta, some tortellini, some ravioli, anything that you might have on hand, just remember to fish out the bay leaf before you dig in.
Not only is this recipe delicious, but it's almost like aromatherapy in the house. It's the equivalent of a cool lavender towel after a hot yoga class. It just feels comforting and relaxing. The garlic, the rosemary creates kind of like this aromatic bouquet.
This soup reminds me of my family, and so I think it's part of its appeal. During the holiday season, when you can't be physically near the people that you love, it helps to be able to evoke their spirit. It can be very grounding to just have the memory of their presence in the house.
Sometimes I wonder, when my son is older and living on his own, what smells will bring him that sense of comfort. And by that I mean food. You do need to qualify that when you're talking about a teenage boy! But in all seriousness, I think that's one of the beautiful things about a home where cooking is a key aspect of life. It creates these sensory connections that live on through generations, that replenish us just as much as the nutrition itself.
This podcast, after all, is called Feed Your Fire, but that's not just about a burning flame. To build and maintain a fire, you need heat, you need fuel, and you need air. This episode is about all three of those things. Until our next episode, I say so long.
Feed Your Fire, where food nourishes growth.