white bean & greens soup, roasted butternut squash

As mentioned previously, I pulled a recipe out of Bittman for my SNAP budget challenge post last week (it's on page 64 in the softcover version). As I was reading through it, I realized that it sounded really good and I had almost all the ingredients for it! Since I was already wandering through Rainbow to price things out for the assignment, I grabbed some collard greens before I left so I could throw this together.

Brown rice, navy beans, collard greens, bay leaf, thyme, onion, garlic, salt, pepper

The first step, as always when working with dry beans, is to sort and rinse them. I described how I usually do this in another post but actually remembered to get a picture this time!

What bean sorting looks like in my kitchen

After that, it's a really simple recipe. I chose to cook down the onion, garlic and spices first, then add the beans and stock. You let that simmer away for about an hour, until the beans start to get soft, then add the rice and greens and cook until everything is done.

My lovely collard greens waiting to go in

That's it. Super duper easy. One-pot cooking=the bomb, especially when you're like me and don't have a dishwasher.

While that was going, I hacked open a butternut squash, rubbed it down with garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and threw it in the oven.

Before roasting

After roasting

When I say hacked, I mean that pretty literally. I love winter squash but cutting it up scares the crap out of me. I'm always afraid I'm going to chop all my fingers off. Luckily they've survived so far.

My friends' cats decided to make themselves at home in the kitchen with me. How I wish I didn't have allergies.

Hello kitten

I ended up throwing a little more garlic into the squash and mashing it with a fork. The soup ended up not being very soup-like because the beans and rice absorbed almost all the liquid, so it turned out to be more of a bean and rice dish. Which is totally fine, I love beans and rice. It needed about twice as much seasoning so I added that after the rest of it was cooked, which was a vast improvement, and I threw some parmesan on top. I have a feeling I'll be tinkering with the leftovers the rest of this week...

Squash & soup!