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1
Pick through beans to make sure there are no stones. Nothing sucks like breaking your teeth on a stone when it should be a bean!
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2
Place the beans in the crock pot; cover with water.
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3
Set on high cooking and cook for an hour.
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4
Now, some of you will argue that we should or should not season the beans because of the skins. Well, it is a moot point here as we are adding something salty to it anyway. Moving right along.
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5
Ham hocks go inches If you cannot find ham hocks, don't worry. The recipe will be fine. Just throw in a ham bone. No ham bone? You're killing me here! You could just use a couple slices of ham.
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6
Add your bay leaf to the crock pot. Don't worry - it will float. No panic. Really!
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7
Hack up the onion, a small dice is fine, toss it into te crock pot.
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8
Mince the garlic, again - you guesed it - into the crockpot. Are you with me so far?.
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9
Hack the potatoes into a medium dice, toss them into the crock pot. You will be needing them to give your soup some body - that stick-to-your-ribs quality. Besides, they are in season.
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10
Set all of that onto 10 hour on low cooking.
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11
Just before serving, remove the meat and bay leaf from the soup. Once the meat is cold enough to handle, shred it up!
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12
Puree up half of the soup with a hand blender. Do it right in the crockpot! Why waste or clean another vessel. If you have dishwashers, then don't worry about it. If you don't - you get the idea.
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13
Put the meat back into the soup.
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14
Now is the time to adjust for seasoning. We start off with the lemon juice, then we adjust the salt and pepper in stages.
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15
Taste a spoon full, think about the saltiness or the pepperiness. *I am sure that should be a word!*.
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16
Once the soup is where you would like it to be, ladle it up and serve it with that local artisan bread.
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17
Props to you! You just cooked something easy for Winter.
