There was so much going on this January—our visit to our friends in Virginia, Thrift Week, Winter Storm Jonas, and my belated birthday dinner with my folks—that I completely forgot about coming up with a Recipe of the Month. Fortunately, Brian took care of it for me by preparing a black bean soup out of our food Bible, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, on the last day of the month. So even though this entry is a little late, the recipe itself actually squeezed in ahead of the deadline.
Visually, this soup isn't very interesting. It's basically an undifferentiated brown slurry...And for the cause that we served it with Brian's new brown bread (recipe to come back as soon as he's perfected it), the complete meal end up brown. But flavor-clever, it is pretty flavorful, heavy at the cumin and brightened up with a touch each of sherry and lime juice. Brian drastically utilized Penzey's vegetable stock as a base, which makes any soup extra savory.
So on the whole, this soup wasn't terrible, however it wasn't notably interesting. To me, I assume, it have become the uniform texture that made it less interesting. Most of my favored soups are chunky ones, with masses of various flavors and textures in every spoonful: pasta e fagioli, loaded with beans and greens and pasta; mushroom barley, with the chewy barley grains spark off via the larger portions of savory mushroom; matzo ball, with the mild matzo balls and chewy bits of carrot and celery gloating in a warm, salty broth. So this basic brown soup, despite its abundance of seasoning, felt a piece...Meh.
Brian, but, pretty preferred it and expressed an hobby in making it once more, as long as I failed to item. I did no longer precisely dislike the soup, even though I could no longer need to consume it for several days in a row?However as long as Brian is inclined to cast off the leftovers, I do not mind a bowlful of this for dinner every now and then. Although subsequent time, in all likelihood, I may additionally choose a distinct sort of bread with it, genuinely to offer the meal as a whole a piece greater range. Perhaps a chewy sourdough might offer sufficient of a comparison in flavor and texture to make the soup more exciting.
