I’m a Believer

Let me start by saying that my entire life, I’ve been a professed HATER of black beans. Actually, I’ve always been a hater of pretty much every bean. I like baked beans at my cookouts, and I can eat garbanzo beans by the handful, but that’s about it. As I’ve been getting more and more into cooking, I’ve heard about other bloggers using dried beans and soaking them, instead of using canned beans. Since I’m willing to try anything once, I thought it sounded interesting and I would give this different method a try.

A few weeks ago, a recipe I had called for black beans, so I thought this would be the perfect time to try out my new idea. The black beans came out fine, but the recipe itself was disgusting. I was upset by the failure, so I just poured the black beans into a ziploc bag and shoved them into a dark crevice of my freezer. A few days later, I got Mama Pea‘s Peas and Thank You cookbook in the mail and, of all things, she had a recipe for Black Bean Soup. I was wary of it because it sounded… pretty disgusting. But why waste a perfectly good frozen bag of black beans when I had this recipe right in front of me? So I dog-eared it and ended up making it the other day.

Mama Pea‘s Black Bean Soup will turn ANY non-believer into a die-hard black bean fan. I was expecting to spit out my first spoonful of this soup, but before I knew it, I was licking the bottom of this bowl clean. This soup is AMAZING!!! Not only is this the best black bean dish I’ve ever had, it’s probably the best SOUP I’ve ever had.

Out of respect for Mama Pea and her new cookbook, I’m not going to post the recipe on my blog. So please go buy her book, because it’s totally worth it, even if it’s just for this one recipe!