Ham and beans has to be about the simplest recipe on earth and the end result is a most delicious meal!  MMMMMMM

Borrow some baby lima beans, black eyed peas, pinto beans, big lima beans, red beans or Anasazi beans from your neighbor.  Or go buy some.  Sort through the bag and take out all the rocks and bad stuff you sometimes find in with the beans.  Put them in a big bowl and cover them with water to soak over night.  Set them aside until tomorrow.

Tomorrow:

Get hold of some ham.  Ham with bone is good.  Ham with ham is good.  You have to have a lot of meat for this to be extra good.  But, if times are tough and you can only get a little ham, so be it, it will still be yummy.  Ham fat is good too if that is all you can get and most folks don’t like ham fat…I do like it.

So, now you have some ham.  Get a couple of yellow onions.  Sometimes you can find them along side the road.  They are the best, cuz they are free.  Even if you have to buy them you are only into the cost about a buck.

Cut up the ham into pieces about half the size of the inside of a eating spoon.  Cuz that is what you will be eating this stuff with later on.  Bigger pieces are too much for the spoon to gather up.  Toss the chunks into a large pot.

Dice up the two onions, spoon size pieces as well and toss them into the pot on top of the ham.

Now pour water in on top of all of that maybe even to the mid level of the pot.

Boil it up!  Then lower the temp and let it still boil but slowly.  Let it cook for a couple of hours with a lid on the pot.  Don’t it smell yummy?

For us old folks with problems caused by salt, you don’t have to put any salt in this if you don’t want to.  Just add in some black pepper to your taste.

OK, now you have the ham and onions all cooked up good.  If you have tossed in a ham bone, git it out and strip all the meat off of it.  Let the bone cool and give it to your dog.  But whatever you do with the bone, don’t put it back into the pot.  If you have used ham hocks, you will have several bones to get out, fish around until you think they are all out.  If you leave one, there will be one of your special guests that will get it in their mouth and even though they won’t say anything to you, they will think “What a dummy.  They don’t even know how to cook”.

Now dump off the water from the beans and put them in the pot with the ham and onions.  Make sure the water level is above the beans and commence to boil it some more.  Depending on the beans you got, it might take anywhere from an hour to maybe even three hours to cook the beans until they are tender and there is a soupy goo in the pot.  MMMMMM  Let this cook down some with the lid off and you will have the best ham and bean soup you ever tasted.

Let your guests (and you) doctor it up with ketchup, salt, pepper, hot sauce or whatever they want.  You can serve it plain in a bowl or put it over some home made corn bread or plain bread.  Saltine crackers are good with it poured over too.  Maybe even cold pizza would be good with it poured over.  I’ll bet it would be.

Bears Butt

Jan. 2012