At-Least-As-Good-As-Grandma’s Ham Bone Lima Bean Soup

What are these things called?  Where do you keep yours?  Do you have a special box for them?  A drawer? 

WHAT?  You don’t keep them? 

Neither do I. 

Gigi does.  That’s my grandma.  Gigi doesn't throw things away.  Gigi was the second-to-youngest of eleven children raised by their widowed mother in the heavy midst of the Great Depression. 

I used to watch Gigi walking home with the bone from our Christmas ham wrapped up with care and cradled in her arms as if it were as precious as one of the gifts of which she’d just been the recipient.  We never wasted the bone from the ham or the turkey.  As a child, I never really fully understood the value of the bone, and thought Gigi’s refusal to throw it in the trash was “just a Great Depression thing”.  (After all, this is the same Gigi who saves the rinse water from one load of laundry to use as the wash water for the next.  Every time she does laundry.)  But even as a child, I couldn’t help but appreciate the big pot of beans that would always materialize on our dinner table a few days later.  Delicious, perfectly seasoned, tender, hearty beans made with that carefully wrapped ham bone that would’ve gone into many families’ garbage can. 

As I’ve gotten older, Gigi has begun to cook less and less.  In the last several years, I’ve realized how much I’ve begun to miss the fruits of Grandma’s labors in the kitchen.  One of the things I miss the most is her ham bone bean soup.  It’s for this reason that I, too, now refuse to throw out the bones from a ham or turkey.  Originally, I set out to be able to make a pot of beans to rival those Gigi used to cook on her big wood-burning stove.  I’ve tweaked and tampered with my technique, and have come up with a recipe that my husband says has to be at least as good as Grandma’s. 

Remember my fondness for making “something out of nothing”? 

Shall we?

Ingredients

bone from 1 ham

2 C chopped carrots

2 C chopped celery

2 C chopped onions

1 (1 lb) bag baby lima beans

chicken bouillon, to taste

brown sugar, to taste

food-grade cheesecloth

     

We’ll start our beans during our Christmas (or whatever special occasion warrants your having made a ham) dinner cleanup.  After the ham has been cleaned of the majority of its useful meat, place the bone (and, yes, all the scraps still attached to it) in a large, doubled-or-tripled-over square of food grade cheesecloth (you can get it at cooking specialty shops, but also look in the craft section of your local WalMart.  That’s where I get mine –) just be sure it says “food grade” on it. 

 

 

Pour all the juice/drippings from the ham into a slow cooker, and place the cheesecloth-tied ham bone in there, too.  Now, place it in the fridge and forget about it for a day or two. 

When we take our bone & stock out of the fridge, we’ll find that the juice has congealed into a sort of jelly-like consistency, and that there is a layer of fat on top of it.  (Stick with me, guys.  This will get more appetizing, I promise!)

 

I usually take a spoon and skim that fat off.  This step isn’t necessary – remember fat=flavor – but I like to do what I can, especially during the holidays when everything I make seems determined to change my dress size.

 

 

Once we’ve got our fat skimmed off, we’ll fill a large (8 C) measuring cup with 8 cups of water.  We’ll pour into the crock pot enough water to cover the bone almost completely and make note of how much water we’ve added.

 

 

 

(So, it took just about 6 cups of water to cover our bone.)

Now, we put the lid on the slow cooker, turn it on, and get the water/stock simmering.  We want to simmer it for a good 3+ hours.  The longer we simmer it, the more flavor we’ll extract from that bone.  I’ve even let mine go overnight before. 

 

(Look at the beautiful color it has after several hours of simmering.  I have added nothing to it at this point.) 

Now, we sort our beans.  This just means we pick through our beans to be sure we don’t find any rocks, damaged beans, or other weird stuff. 

I found these little pebbles in mine this time, but you won’t always find anything.

 

 

Once we’ve sorted our beans, we rinse them off in a colander. 

   

Now, we put them in a large saucepan, and add 8 C of water and about 1 T of oil (to prevent frothing). 

We bring them to a boil, boil them for just 2 minutes, then turn the heat off, cover them, and let them soak for at least 1 hour. While our beans are soaking, it’s a good time to chop our vegetables.  My family likes a lot of veggies when I make this soup, so I chop about 2 C each of celery, carrots, and onions.  Adjust these for your family’s preferences.

 

 

Here’s a before, during, and after of the soaking process…

Unsoaked (before):

boiling:

  

after the boil but before the soak:

and after a 1.5 hour soak:

 

Once our beans are soaked, we drain the soaking water off of them.

…rinse them well…

 

(The rinsing step is particularly important if you or someone in your family has trouble with…AHEM…the unfortunate side effects of beans.  Rinsing the soaked beans well helps minimize the gas they produce.) 

Now, we’ll put the rinsed beans into our slow cooker with our ham bone and let them simmer for an hour or so.

 

Then, we add our veggies. 

[I had to remove some of the stock to fit all my veggies in (I put it back in later, after I’d removed the bone), and I wanted you to see how beautiful the stock – still unseasoned!- is…]

 

Now, we’ll put the cover back on the slow cooker and simmer the beans & veggies with the bone for another hour or so. 

 

Now, we can remove the bone by just sticking a pair of large tongs or meat fork through the tie in the cheesecloth and lifting it out into a pot waiting nearby. 

 

Our veggies at this point are not yet completely cooked, and our beans are still slightly soft.  We’ll just add our seasoning and let it finish simmering to fully cook the beans and veggies.  Add some chicken bouillon (I really like this Wyler’s brand because it has added herbs & seasoning) – to taste.  Think back to the amount of water you added, reducing the bouillon added to factor for the flavoring that’s coming out of the ham.  If you recall, I added 6 C of water at the beginning of my cooking, so I started with about 4 tsp of bouillon.  This ended up being about right, but you might find you need to add more (up to 1 tsp. per cup of water added at the beginning). 

 

Also add brown sugar, to taste.  I used about 1/4 c for my 4.5 qt slow cooker full of beans, but your family may like more or less. 

 

If you have some ham meat left over, you can chunk it up and throw it in there, too.  But don’t be afraid to make this soup without any meat.  The flavor from that bone is incredible; you won’t even miss the meat!  Now just replace the lid and simmer the beans until they’re soft and the veggies are cooked.  

      

 

Once you’ve worked with lima beans a bit, you’ll begin to be able to tell if they’re done cooking almost just by looking at them.  When they’re cooked, they take on a slight transparency. 

      

 

You can also see that, despite being heavy on the veggies and generous with the beans, we’re left with just enough of that delicious, basic liquid for dipping a roll. 

     

…or three. 

I hope, as you’ve read this, that it hasn’t seemed terribly archaic.  So many of us are repurposing our old clothes into adorable things for our kids, shopping at thrift stores for furniture we can refinish, and putting considerable efforts into living greener lives.  Really, recycling your ham bone is just an extension of this lifestyle.  Canning and preserving are coming back into favor.  Why not a technique like this? 

I hope I’ve convinced you to try it.  After all, what have you got to lose? 

Just a ham bone that was on its way to the garbage, anyway. 

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I’ll be spending the next few days focusing on my little family.  But, I want you to know that I’ll be thinking of you, too.  I hope your tables are full with family members, and I hope Santa finds you on his “nice” list tonight.  More than that, though, I hope we can all spend some time reflecting on the true meaning of this wild and wonderful season. 

I’ll be back on Monday with some great ideas & tips for putting together your New Years’ Eve parties and get-togethers. 

In the meantime, from my family to yours, we wish you the very merriest of Christmases.