Easy Bean and Ham Soup

It's getting so close to autumn and cold weather and hot weather food. I love soups and stews and chili. They are so comforting. I've gotten hyped up about them a little early and started soup making already. Here's one of my favorites-


Very Easy Bean and Ham Soup

Ingredients-

- 3 to 4 carrots, peeled and chopped into coins
- 3 to 4 celery stalks, chopped
- 1 onion diced
- 3 to 4 cloves of garlic, diced (depending on your love of garlic, ours is strong)
- 2 cans of white beans
- 1 cup of diced ham
- ham bone (optional, but yummy)
- 4 cups of chicken stock
- 1 tablespoon of Italian seasoning
- salt and pepper to taste (don't add salt until the end after you taste it! ham is very salty)

 How to-

I usually start with roasting a ham. I do this the day or 2 before and use some of the ham for dinner that night. Usually for a 13 dollar ham on the bone I can stretch it out to 3 meals. So for the first night we just had sliced ham and some veggies and a starch. Then I chopped up what I needed for my soup and reserved the ham bone.

Super easyness about to happen- chop up your carrots, celery, onion and garlic and throw it all in a heavy bottom soup pot with some oil over medium heat and cook it about 5 minutes until it's softened up and fragrant.

Add your Italian seasoning and let that cook a minute to rev up that flavor. Add your cans of beans and your ham and the chicken stock and then plop the ham bone right in there. I leave a lot of meat around mine so that it falls apart as it cooks. Add a couple of cups of water if you need some more liquid or more chicken stock if you have it.

Crank the heat up and bring all of this to a boil. Turn it down to a simmer, cover it up and cook it for about 2 hours. Add a little pepper (or a lot, if you're like us) and taste to see if it needs salt. Ours didn't at all. All done!

Serve this deliciousness with some crusty bread or some garlic bread and you're good to go! So good. So easy. So filling and comforting. Cheers!