Greens and Beans and all that they Mean(s)

Being a consultant relegates every measure of my social, athletic, cultural, and culinary life to the brief hours between friday and sunday nights. I travel four days a week, typically leave Monday mornings, returning late Thursday night with little energy, interest, or ingredients for cooking. I go to the office on Fridays, and generally have plans to eat out a couple of times between Friday night and Sunday, SO, rarely is it practical or necessary for me to have food in my fridge.

Being home in NY for four days is a true cause de celebre. With this schedule, going to the green market, an activity I once enjoyed tremendously, is a masochistic experience much like browsing Bergdorf's, where I'm tempted by excruciatingly needy merchandise that I'm an idiot to think I have any reason to own. I tried to refuse this reality, to fight it, but have in my year as a consultant thrown away too many-a-moldy bag of veggies due to my stubborn determination to buy fresh produce. It was when it occured to me that within the plastic produce bags pulled from the drawers of my fridge I've seen mold in every color, literally ROYGBIV, that I resigned myself to eating out 7 days a week. My fridge in fact, before a cathartic grocery run on Thursday night, looked like that of an emaciated refugee's whose strict rations have weeks ago run out. It contained exactly two cloves of garlic, about 6 soft -correction: elastic- carrot sticks, and maybe 3 inches of totally dried out brie rind. Mustard too.

What better to nurture my undernourished soul during this chilly four-day weekend than soup? A lot of soup in fact; with a melange of colorful, perishible goodness in it? We agree then, that a soup is just what the Dr. ordered, and a shining soup twas', complete with beans (white), greens (kale), squash (butternut), carrots and herbs.

I didn't follow any recipe exactly, rather took inspiration from this one and this one. My hybrid recipe, based largely on what produce whet my appetite at the market called for the following:

I chopped the onions and garlic and sauteed until tender before adding the beans (drained and rinsed) and the herbs:

To add texture and color, I peeled and very coarsely chopped about a cup and a half of both carrots and butternut squash. I added the entire carton of broth plus about 2 cups of water and brought to a simmer before adding the carrots and squash.


Now, the KALE! Both the stems and the veins- not all the veins, just the major artery down the center of each leaf- need to be cut out. Use the point of a sharp knife to do this, then tear the leaves into 1-2 inch pieces.

Drop the kale into the simmering soup, and stir until it wilts:

Et voila, this soup is finished. And great. But not perfect. There are all of these wonderful textures floating in a broth with no texture at all. I read a lot of recipes for white bean soup that blended about half the portion of beans to add texture to the broth- this I will certainly try next time. What I won't change is the combination of ingredients; the butternut-squash, my affectation, absolutely belonged.