Mexican Black Bean Soup
Black bean soups and chilis are great food for the winter, because they’re rich and hearty and the spiciness warms you from the inside out. They also reheat fabulously, for those with smaller households or who like to bring their lunch.
This soup is on the thin side as written on the book (with an extra cup of water), but I like my soups on the thicker side. I’m totally guilty of using up half a package of saltines in thin soups to get it to the consistency I like. The photo above was taken on the third eating of the soup, so it’s really starting to thicken up.
Stuffed Shells
Dinner tonight was pretty simple — pasta shells filled with mushrooms, spinach, ricotta, sun dried tomatoes, and baked with marinara; garlic bread; slacker garden salad. The recipe for the pasta shells (if you want to call it that): 12 (cooked) shells (enough for dinner + a lunch) filled with: 1 C of (skim) ricotta, 4 mushrooms (roughly diced), 5oz chopped spinach (we used previously frozen, so you’d have to wilt it first), 3 sundried tomatoes (minced), 1-2 cloves of garlic (minced), 1/2-1 tsp oregano/basil/parsley, generous pinch of crushed red pepper, pinch of salt, about 1/4tsp onion powder. In theory, you should use an egg to bind it, but I really didn’t think it needed it, so I left it out.
The stuffing was reallly similar to a Greek-y stuffing we use in pork or chicken and it could probably be used for that, too.
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