I've been working 60 hours a week for three weeks in a row now. Uhg. About 3.5 weeks ago now, I pledged to myself that I was cleaning up my eating habits, aiming for as little processed food and added sugars as possible. Other than two meals served in whole wheat wraps during that period, I've stuck to it. Oh, and that one hard cider after that impossible day, but come on, give a girl a break.

Thing is, working as much as I have been, my meals have mostly consisted of salads, cups of pre-made soup, and cottage cheese topped with veggies or fruit. I like salads, soups, and cottage cheese quite a bit, but still, I was really wanting a fuller meal tonight and got off work at 5pm, hurrah! In honor of this event, I created a new cheap, healthy, easy meal that I think is about to become a staple in our house. The meal has a bit of sugar in it and the processed sausage, but its affordable and full of fiber and greens, so again, I'm cutting myself some slack.

This is a what I call a "shorty" - a recipe made with many pre-concocted ingredients so its almost more heating things than cooking, but the result is still a satisfying home-cooked-feeling meal. Don't get me wrong, I try to avoid "cooking from cans" when I can, but this meal, can-ful as it is, is still a far healthier and cheaper option than going out to eat. The cost comes out, if done with vegan sausage, $3.29 a serving if made with ingredients from the co-op (I worked it out and if you replaced the vegan sausage with some local farm Triple S sausage its $3.40 a serving). Its not cheap enough to qualify for our Food For All program recipes which can all be made for $2 or less a serving from all CGFC ingredients, but still, $3.29 for a big satisfying bowl of delicious home-cooked goodness that is done in 15 minutes total? Sign me up.

Greens and Beans
4 Servings
1 T olive oil ($0.20-ish)
1 organic yellow onion, chopped ($1.50)
1 bunch local collard greens, remove tough stems, chop ($3.49, Prairerth Farm)
8oz Tofurky beer brats, sliced ($3.14)
2 - 15oz cans of Field Day organic maple & onion baked beans ($4.78)
1 tsp chipotle powder ($0.05-ish)

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan, once hot add the chopped onion. Cook over medium-high heat for a few minutes, then toss in the collards. Sprinkle on some salt and cook until the greens get bright and soften a bit, about 3 minutes. Push the greens to one side of the pan, then add the sausage. Cook until brown a bit on the edges touching the pan and hot, about 3 minutes (if it is animal sausage cook a few minutes longer and make sure it is cooked through, no pink in the middle, before proceeding to the next step). Add both cans of beans and the chipotle powder. Stir in well and continue to heat until a hot.

This makes generous, filling servings. I took a picture to show you the finished product . . . but it seems to have disappeared from my camera's memory, boo. Trust me, it looks like a delicious stew you can't wait to dive into. This recipe will leave you with 1 and a half  Tofurky sausages left over to flavor another meal later in the week, bonus! I think this also could be very good with a bit of Worcestershire sauce added as well, but it was mighty fine as in, and as I said, done in 15 minutes! I'm definitely making this one again after a long day at the office. So nice to know you can make something so quick and healthful after a long day at work that costs about half what a fast food "value meal" would cost that tastes soooo much better. And, for those interested, I threw the recipe into a calorie calculator and came up with 429 calories per serving. Very reasonable, no?

Do you have a go to very fast, very affordable, yet healthy dinner recipe for busy nights?

Quick Dinners From a Can (or "pumkin curry soup in a flash for those days")

Being home with a sick little boy today, I didn't get a lot done that I'd hoped to, but I did get to catch up on all the produce in my fridge that was desperately needing using up. What to do with all the beets and radishes  just about to go south? I started a beet kimchee ferment, if it turns out I'll post about it here soon. (I love fermenting!) I composted some stuff too, I have to admit, but I caught the cauliflower *just* before it was going to go off, thank goodness! Now I had to find something to do with it.

I discover cauliflower pretty late in life, as in, about three years ago. I was raised without it being a part of my diet and as an adult I just never discovered it until my mid-30s. Now I can't believe that, as it is one of my favorite vegetables. Most people think I am nuts when I say that, but its really true. So what did I do with this sad looking head of cauliflower? (This isn't the actual one I had, like I said, I had a sick kid at home with me, so I forgot to take my own pics. My cauliflower looked worse.)

I trimmed off the browning bits, then cut it up into florets and roasted it.

Roasted Cauliflower
1 big head cauliflower, cut into small florets
1 T olive oil
1 tsp ground cardamom
2 tsp tumeric
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Toss all the ingredients into a big bowl, stir until the cauliflower is well coated with all the other ingredients. Spread the mixture in a thin layer on metal cookie sheets and cook for 15 minutes, then stir, and return to the oven. Check it again in 10 more minutes, it should be starting to brown on the edges, that's a *good* thing. Stir again and return to the oven if not yet browned on many of its edges. Once browned, remove from the oven and let cool. It should look like this (again, not my pic):

Now I was running out of time, I was getting hungry and my partner would be home for dinner soon. What to do? Aha! My 15 min pumpkin curry soup! I had roasted up some winter squash already earlier in the day, but I've made this with canned pumpkin or butternut squash and it works great. Its a go-to fall meal for me for when I have no time to cook but want dinner to still be pretty healthy.

15 Min Pumpkin Curry Squash Soup
2 tsp cooking oil of your choice or ghee
1 yellow onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced (or tsp or so of garlic powder in you are in a real rush)
1 thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, minced
2 T curry powder blend of your choice
1 can coconut milk (lite or regular)
1 can (16oz) of pumpkin or butternut squash puree, plain
Vegetable broth

Put the oil or ghee in a soup pot, heat on med-high flame, then add the onion. Stir and cook until the onion is pretty soft, 5 minutes. Add the garlic and ginger, keep stirring and cooking 2-3 minutes more, then add the curry spice and stir to coat the onion for 1 minute. Pour the can of coconut milk into the pot and stir, scraping up any bits of the curry that got stuck to the pan. Add the pureed squash and mix well, then add veggie broth (or chicken for those who enjoy it) until its a consistency you like. Heat through. Done!

If you have the time, you can add broth until the soup is thinner than you like and then add 1/2 cup red lentils (has to be *red* ones, they cook up fast) and simmer the soup until the lentils have softened, about 10 minutes. Add more broth as needed until the lentils are done.

Here's where the cauliflower comes in:  put your lovely, tasty, easy-as-heck soup in bowls, then top with a big handful or two of your roasted cauliflower. Don't stir it in, just serve like that, its prettier that way, you can stir it in when you go to eat. Want to get really fancy? Serve with lime wedges and fresh minced cilantro. Didn't have time to do the cauliflower? No problem, serve with crusty bread, leftover rice, leftover quinoa, or as is!

Healthy and a heck of a lot cheaper than going out!

Autumn Returns

You always know it is coming, but still, fall always takes me by surprise, especially after a summer as wicked as the one we've had this year. The summer was very early, very hot, and there was a bad drought. It was the kind of summer you couldn't wait to put behind you, but also the kind you began to wonder if would ever end.

But end it did, and with pretty timing too. Just a day or so before the autumnal equinox, on came the cool cool nights. Walking with E to the farmer's market around 7:30 this morning, we were bundled in fleece-lined hoodies and knit hats, and our fingers and noses got quite cold. The first very fall market of the year I cannot resist all the autumn vegetables. After getting E his muffin from the Muffin Man, we rounded up some red cabbage, green beans, turnips, salad green, new potatoes, and winter squash. Most of the veggies went into a basic vegetable stew, but the winter squash I had other plans for. Potluck plans.

For E's 1st birthday, years back now, I went a bit nuts and made a lot of food for everyone. I love making up food for parties, but back then we were broke, I was working constantly, and E was a high-demands kid. It really was nuts, but maybe getting to do something I take so much pleasure in actually helped keep me sane. It was for that party that I made up the Winter Squash Spread, based on a vague memory of my friend Jessy making some sort of butternut squash spread for pizza when we both worked in a natural food store kitchen together. From this experiment the Squash Spread was born.

I always make it with butternut squash and it always comes out perfect. This time, I let the beauty of a red kuri squash lure me in and I used it instead. I'd never had a red kuri before and the flavor of the flesh was wonderful, but it had a grainier and drier texture than a butternut and it showed in the end results. I'd recommend using the butternut for this, it can't be beat.

Winter Squash Potluck Spread

1 medium butternut squash
2 bulbs of garlic
2 T grapeseed oil (or other oil that does well at high heat)
2 medium yellow onions, coarsely chopped
1 cup raw hazelnuts
salt and black pepper to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Chop the butternut squash in half lengthwise and scoop out all the stingy guts and seeds, place on a lightly oiled baking sheet. Break the bulbs of garlic into cloves and remove all the papery bits. Put half of the garlic cloves in the cavity of one squash half, the rest of the garlic in the cavity of the other half of the squash. Flip the squash halves over onto the baking tray with the garlic trapped between the squash and the pan. Poke the backs of both squash halves with a knife in a couple of places, this will allow the releasing of steam and help the squash cook more evenly. Bake for 45 minutes, then prick with a fork, if it slides in easily the squash is done, otherwise check again every 7-10 minutes until done.

While the squash cooks, place the hazelnuts on another baking tray with sides so they don't slide off and place in the oven for 3-5 minutes. The hazelnuts should become fragrant and darken just a tad. Take them out of the oven and pour them onto a dry dish towel. Let cool until just cool enough to handle the nuts in the towel, then use the towel to agitate and rub the hazelnuts, loosening their skins until most fall off. Don't worry about getting them all off, but you do want to get off as much of the skins as is possible without tons of effort. Put the nuts sans most of their skins in the food processor and process until very fine.

Put 1T of the oil in a skillet and add the onions over medium-low heat. Toss in the onion, stir in the oil, then turn down to low heat. Stir every few minutes and allow the onion to slowly caramelize. This process will take around 20 minutes to complete, the onions should be tender and lightly browned all over. Add the onions to the food processor bowl.

Once the squash is done cooking let it cook until you can touch it safely, then flip it over. Put the garlic in the food processor bowl, then scrape the flesh of the squash out of the skin and into the food processor bowl as well. Add salt and pepper, then process until very smooth.

Serve with baguette or pita chips, or use as a spread on pizza in place of the usual tomato sauce. If you have left overs you can thin it with a bit of broth and serve it with bread as a soup the next day. The soup freezes well for future use.

I feel silly, but I forgot to take a picture of the pretty end product all gussied up in one of my spouse's handmade pottery bowls. Ah well, trust me, it turns out a lovely golden color. Put it in a pretty bowl, put the bowl on a large place, and surround the bowl with your chips or bread slices, and then head off to your potluck party! Trust me, you'll be getting requests for the recipe for this tasty and healthy nosh!

To the Beat of the Knife and Skillet

Food sucks up time.

I touched on this a bit in my last post, the fact that we pay in extra dollars and loss of nutrition (usually) when we have others prepare our food rather than spend the time and develop the skills to prepare food ourselves. And I talked about how I am trying to get honest with myself about this and the way I chose to pay - in dollars and lost nutrients or in precious time I could be putting to many other things.

Our ancestors spent huge gobs of time preparing food. Whether they grew the food themselves or not, they still spent great amounts of time cleaning, trimming, mixing, and cooking food. Food was central to every day, almost every minute of the day. It was a constant focus between obtaining the food, preparing the food, consuming the food, and preserving the food. I'm not the first to observe this, I know. But I've been thinking about this a lot, the way I even remember my grandmother just 30 years ago being seemingly always in the kitchen. I know I've got rose-colored glasses on when looking back to that time, I am sure I do, but I don't remember grandma being miserable when in the kitchen and I do remember how happy and honored I felt on the occasion she'd give me something to do to help with the big meal she was working on. This only happened a few times as my grandma was very sick by the time I was 7 or so, but those memories stuck.

My father's mother had a tiny kitchen in a house where she was raising 11 children on a tight budget on 100% homemade food, some of it grown in her own garden. The steam of food releasing moisture as cooked seemed a constant in the background as my cousins ran around the house and in and out the backdoor that was located in that kitchen. Who could doubt, when grandma was still alive and well, that the kitchen was the heart of that house? My mother and aunts would crowd in it on holidays or family birthday parties, peeling vegetables, washing dishes, and talking and singing together. I resisted the kitchen duties after grandma died and as I grew because I began to see that only the women were expected to partake in these tasks while the men sat around or played sports. I decided I would not do kitchen work either if the Y chromosome types of my family deemed it not their job and got to play. Looking back, I see I kind of shorted myself on sharing the warmth and work of the kitchen, on overhearing the family stories and tales but I empathize with that young girl and rather respect her spunk.

My mother's mother had a very different kitchen and prepared very different food. She never baked and her cooking was more all-American, full of casseroles and such (my father's mother was Italian and her cooking reflected it) but still, the kitchen was the heart of the house. We'd go over to her house after school on Wednesdays and no matter where we roamed in the house or yard, there would be grandma making dinner in the kitchen, the anchor in the center of the house. She had this wonderful little bar you could sit at in her dinning room that looked into the kitchen and you could nibble on after-school snacks and chat with my always-smiling grandma as she peeled the potatoes or mixed up the meatloaf.

Cooking is work, a lot of work, and when it is left to us whether we want the task or not by societal expectations I can understand why it could be a drudgery. I think this idea, that preparing our food is drudgery forced on women, seeped into me and I missed how much food preparation was at the center of so many happy memories for me. When the work is shared or there is someone sitting nearby keeping you company and telling you about their day, perhaps the work is transformed.

I am thinking about this a lot because this will be my third week in a row of working around 60 hours and when all you do is eat, sleep, WORK, go home for a quick dinner, WORK again, come home to put your child to bed and then crash on the couch for an hour before sleeping society tells you you deserve to eat out. We hear it again and again, we're much too busy to cook, I've had a hard day so I'm dragging the family out for pizza, etc. I've had many, many days like this. But what I've started thinking lately, without noticing at first, is that if I am going to work this hard what I deserve is a healthy meal that is going to nourish my body and help me wake up alert in the morning. What I deserve is the fun of sitting at the dinning room table with my partner chopping up the cheap produce of the season to freeze and to savor the idea of how good it will taste to serve it up later and how proud and happy we'll feel doing so. What I am starting to think is, making food isn't some drudgery I have to wedge into my day and do on top of everything else, its a constant and comforting rhythm that turns my days into a dance of movement and planning and nourishment.



It was a joy to sit at my dinning room table tonight and peel and chop up two dozen mangos with my partner while my son played in the background. We didn't even talk really, we just enjoyed the companionable silence and the task in front of us. There is something really satisfying about the feel of a very sharp knife skimming down the curve of a mango, the skin falling away in smooth petals. There is something deeply satisfying about the full bowl of juicy fruit ready to be spread on cookie sheets and frozen for future enjoying, about the idea of stocking your larder for future meals. There is a pride and sense of simple accomplishment in getting a few things chopped up just before bed and stocked away in the fridge so you are ready to throw together a quick and healthy dinner for your family between commitments tomorrow. There is a part of me that say, "yes, this is good, this is not drudgery, this is a gift we get to partake of every single day."

Now if only I can start to see preparing food through that lens more days than not, wouldn't that be something?

We Pay Either Way

As most who read this know, I teach a class at Common Ground for free every month that I developed starting in January of '09 called, "Eating Healthy on a Budget" (EHOB). In the process of gathering the information from that class I learned a great deal and I've learned just as much if not more from the hundreds of people who have taken the class now.

With the community awareness of the class growing over the last two years, I've started to get requests to teach the class outside the confines of Common Ground. I've made forays into teaching the class in front of low income audiences full of folks who rarely if ever go to farmers' markets or natural food stores and I've bombed there. That's a very interesting story in of itself and one worthy of discussion, but not the one I'm planning to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the other kind of EHOB presentations I've done outside of Common Ground. I've put together a very abbreviated version of the class in powerpoint form that I can do as a talk in 25-30 minutes because I kept getting requests from University of Illinois groups, local churches, local environmental organizations and the like to do so.

One thing I've added to the presentation version of EHOB is more price comparisons. I already show folks in the full class a can of organic black beans and tell them the price, then make them guess how much the bag of dried beans I also have with me that would make the same amount of beans in the can would cost and the students are always pretty impressed with the difference. (It's around $2.00, by the way). But in need of a few more exciting visuals for the presentation version, I costed out a few things people tend to buy pre-made and what they cost to make from ingredients at the co-op. The results didn't surprise me *that* much at first, but they did make me curious. If it only costs $0.78 to make with all organic or local ingredients the same amount of lentil soup I get in a can at the store for $1.89 (conventionally, $2.49 organically), what about what it would cost to make favorite restaurant dishes?

I've not gotten around to in-depth costing I am ready to share in final form, but the process has already pointed out to me what a dramatic difference it makes to cook at home, even when you use the really "pricey" ingredients. We'll say to ourselves, "oh, that organic cheese is too expensive to use as our everyday cheese around the house!" but not blink at paying $7 at Panera for half a sandwich and a small cup of soup made from conventional ingredients in a factory and just heated up in a pan. We're not having an honest conversation with ourselves about food when we tell ourselves organic and high quality ingredients are too expensive but we then go out to eat several meals a week.

The truth is we live busy, busy lives. Sometimes, convenience is worth the price, just to have someone else make lunch or dinner. Thing is, we pay not only a lot out of our pocket books, we pay nutritionally too, are we really aware of that? Even when we get a big salad and some low-fat soup at the restaurant, the ingredients are from factory farms, shipped in plastic, full of pesticides, and often made months ago. And we pay far more for it than we would have paid to make the food at home with the very best, fresh ingredients.

And there's a reason prepared food costs more - because making food is work, time-consuming work. That's why we're often eating out in the first place, right? The salads you buy in the Common Ground deli can be made at home from the same ingredients for far less than you'll pay for a co-op deli salad and for good reason. Half or more of the cost of prepared food, in a restaurant or at home, is in the preparation. The preparation costs when you buy food out because people have to be paid to put in the minutes and hours of preparation we decided you couldn't afford (or didn't know how to) put into the food. At home, the time costs because we have to have it to put into the making of the food instead of other things. The cost of food is not just about the ingredients so, honestly, do we feel we its worth it to our health and our pocketbook to invest the time?

The answer isn't always "yes" for me. I work 40-60 hours a week depending what is going on at the co-op, right now, with a major expansion of the co-op looming, I'm working closer to the 60 end of the spectrum. My husband works 32-40 hours a week. We have a four year old son. Sometimes, despite my best intentions, I forget to coordinate the meals, make the meal plans, buy the ingredients. And sometimes I am just too damned tired and decide I don't want to make the food. I'm working to be honest with myself about this, about my choices, and to look at the real cost of them.

This weekend I am having one of my more food-ambitious swings. Despite a crazy long work week and having only one day off, I am feeling like making some food plans and executing them. So, today, I started with salad.



I pre-made these salads so they are ready to grab for lunches at work, already portioned out. All the ingredients are from the co-op.

I used:
- head of lettuce
- 3 green onions
- 1 medium carrot
- 1/8th of a head of red cabbage
- 1 pkg of baked tofu from the co-op deli
- 3 T of slivered almonds

This made 4 lunch portion salads. Without dressing, these are costing me $1.81 a piece, I am guessing 1 T of homemade dressing for each will cost me around $0.35, taking it to $2.16 a salad. A similar-sized salad at Common Ground's deli costs $3.95.

I turned the rest of the cabbage into homemade sauerkraut, but that's another post!

Next up, making a simple cold tomato and basil soup. That costs me about $1.22 a portion (1 cup, same as a "cup" at Common Ground's deli.) So lunch of a green salad with tofu and a cup of tomato soup from home will cost me around $3.50 with all fabulous organic ingredients, not attempting to use budget-conscious ingredients at all.

Is it worth the time? This week it is, to me. And it'll sure taste just as good if not better than the same sized soup-and-salad lunch at the restaurant around the corner from work that will charge me $7.99 and use non-organic ingredients. But, depending on what stresses next week brings, don't be surprised to see me at that same restaurant when you go out to lunch next Tuesday. We all do our best.

Something for Nothing

I'm not actually very enthusiastic about gardening. Well, no, that's not fair. I love watching the garden come to life, I love checking on my little garden beds, and I love most of all harvesting food from my very own garden beds. But I am a lazy gardener who does not, at least doesn't yet, enjoy the work that goes into a garden all that much. But I love the results and even my half-hearted efforts of the last four years have born some very rewarding fruit.

I planted radishes, a mescilun mix, red lettuce, white russian kale, arugula, and beets this spring. Soon after I planted, we started investigating a house. We weren't really looking to buy, but this house had everything we were dreaming of and . . . well, next thing you know, I was thinking to myself, "should I really bother with the garden, all the weeding and such? I mean, soon, this might not even be my garden." And, soon, the weeds started taking over. Everything still grew (other than the arugula, which didn't even start,but it was my first year trying it in the garden, c'est la vie)but other than harvesting the rewards, I've done nada. No weeding. No watering. Nothing. Its getting rather specularly wild back there.

I left several beds unplanted where I'd usually have bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes planted by now because it turns out we will be selling our home to the park district (we live right on a public park and they'd like to make more park out of our property) and buying a lovely new home right at the height of garden season. In these unplanted beds one of my very favorite weeds has taken over: lambsquarters. I have one whole bed so full of it and little else it looks like I purposefully planted it that way.

Many of us weed this stuff out all the time not knowing it is a tasty powerhouse of nutrition. Seriously, its a mild but delicious green, grows just about everywhere with no effort on our part, and is amazing for you. If you doubt me, check out the nutritional analysis here.



You can use lambsquarters any way you would use spinach, although I think of the taste as more like a mild asparagus. Here's a pic of it in its natural habitat, looks familiar, doesn't it? And here's a recipe for my favorite way to use it, in pesto.



Baa Baa Pesto
2 packed cups of fresh lambsquarters, leaves and very thin stems only
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, no stems, chopped up a bit
1/2 cup walnuts (toast them a bit in a skillet first for even richer flavor)
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2-3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
2T crumbled sheep feta from Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign (feel free to sub in any other feta or 1/4 cup grated hard Italian cheese like Parmesan or Asiago instead)
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Throw it all in the food processor or bender and blend until it forms a paste. Tada!

The feta and walnuts in this recipe aren't super cheap on first blush, I admit, but I love feta because you need so little of it to get a flavor punch that I think it is more useful ounce for ounce than most cheeses. Its what I call a high-impact ingredient - a lot of bang for your buck. Two tablespoons is less than 2 ounces, leaving you plenty of extra feta for fancying-up your eggs in the morning and tossing in salads. And yeah, walnuts aren't cheap, but they are nutritionally fabulous, full of omega-3 fatty acids, and again, add a lot of flavor for your buck.

All said, I made this pesto for about $4 and it will be enough for two meals for our family, easy. I am tossing it with quinoa, cherry tomatoes, and summer squash tonight. Later this week I will slather it on as a base for homemade pizza and top with lots and lots of veggies.

Three more quick notes on this recipe:
1. Vegans, sub out the cheese for 2-4T of nutritional yeast (to your tastes), absolutely yummy!
2. This pesto freezes great, I put it in 1/2 pint Ball canning jars and throw it in the freezer for up to 3 months. Just make sure the container is freezer-safe and air tight and you are good to go.
2. If you are going to store the pesto for a day or longer the very top of it will darken and discolor. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you don't want it to discolor top it with a thin layer of olive oil after packaging to prevent it.

Comfort Food

We've all got them. I'm talking about comfort foods that bring back a very specific memory or warm feeling from childhood. Many of mine are not-so-healthy, but one of the big exceptions is my great grandma Fiocchi's Italian bean soup. While I have vague memories of my still-agile great grandmother bustling in her kitchen making this soup when I was very, very young, my real memories of this soup are from my mother's kitchen. I adored this soup, the tender bits of potato were my very favorite part, my mom always cut them very small and uniform and there was something about that exact way she chopped them every time that made the soup extra special for me. And there was this flavor, this one really rich flavor in it that I couldn't put my finger on as a child or teen. I now know it was the flavor of gobs of fresh parsley, adding it to any soup or sauce is still an almost guaranteed way to make me fall in love with a dish.

All of great grandma's recipes that had been transcribed directly from great grandma by one of her daughters and my mom photocopied them all and gave them to me to use in my own kitchen when I got married. Even though I only use a few of the recipes now as a vegetarian (many contain meat)and others I just haven't gotten around to trying, this collection of recipes is to this day my most treasured wedding present. The food processor died long ago, the towel sets wore out, but this collection of recipes still has a special place on my cookbook shelf. I've made adjustments to the way my great grandma prepared the soup, but the happy warm feeling it brings me to taste it is just the same. I look forward to passing the recipe down to my son some day. Maybe on his wedding day.

Below is the recipe as I inherited it, exactly as my great grandma dictated it, meat left in. Its a very simple recipe with few ingredients, like all recipes for the best comfort food. There are lots of recipes that are complex and intricate that we can bring out to enliven a celebration or holiday, but comfort food is meant to be easy, everyday food. I've added my adjustments and comments in parenthesis.

"Italian Bean Soup

In about 3 quarts of water, cook about 1 cup of rice, or diallini or salad macs (I use whole wheat macaroni) and 1 medium diced potato (skin left on.) Add the sauce (the sauce refers to the rest of the recipe, below.) Salt to taste. Cook until rice or ditalini are cooked. Add 1 can kidney beans or Roman beans (I use 1.5 cups kidney and add 1.5 cups garbanzos to replace the meat in the recipe.)

Bean Soup Sauce
2 T cooking oil or chopped salt pork (I use cooking olive oil)
1 T ground pork (again, I leave this out usually, although Gimme Lean "ground beef" is a great veggie substitute in this recipe if you want to leave that element of flavor/texture in the dish)
1 large or 2 medium cloves garlic
1 cup chopped parsley
1 cup tomato or tomato juice (my mom always uses juice, so that's generally what I use, but this is a great place to use up some over-ripe tomatoes in the summer too)
salt to taste

If chopped salt pork is used, saute it a bit before adding the ground pork. With oil, you can start right off. Saute until ground meat is dry (mom's note is to add the garlic with the meat, it was left out of the recipe by great grandma). Add the parsley and tomato. Allow it to simmer about 1/2 hour. (Add the "sauce" to the water, potato, and pasta, then do the simmering.) "

And yes, it is very, very affordable to make, even with the ground pork. To make it a truly "Food for All" recipe, steal a page from the Italians by putting a piece or hunk of stale bread in the bottom of each serving bowl and ladling the soup over. Not only do you get to use up bread that otherwise might have gone to waste, it adds a delicious heartiness and texture to the soup.