A number of you emailed asking about the soup pictured at the top the recent favorites list. This one. It was at the top of my list for a reason. If last year was the year of lentil soups, this year has been all about one rustic bean and celery soup. I make it a lot. I make it for us to eat. I made it when our neighborhood wine club came over. And I made it to share at soup night over at my friend Holly's. The original recipe is Hassan's Celery and White Bean Soup with Tomato and Caraway, from Moro East. It's a soup shared in the book by Sam & Sam's allotment neighbor - celery, caraway, and garlic are cooked together alongside big hearty beans and chopped tomatoes in what becomes an olive-oil dappled broth. You serve each bowl with chopped black olives and fresh lemon wedges. I thought I'd share a holiday version of the stew made with Christmas Lima beans.
As is prone to happen, the first few times I made Hassan's stew, I followed the recipe verbatim. Then I started making tweaks. In the beginning, I would blanched and seed the tomatoes, I would track down spring onions. I would use the exact beans called for. And I was smitten. The soup is awesome. But eventually the onions disappeared from the market, and then the best tomatoes did too. And I still wanted to make the soup. And I wanted it to be just as good.
There were also those nights when I wanted to make the soup, but I was short on time. I wondered, could I shave some time off the prep by using good canned tomatoes? What about beans? I have some giant corona beans already cooked, those might be nice. And on and on...you'll see all my tweaks, notes, and considerations in the recipe below. I also made this a larger pot of soup. Most of you know by now, if I'm going to make soup, I'm going to make a good-sized pot of it. Plenty for leftovers.
If you ignore everything else I write about today, pay attention to this. You can't skip out on the toppings. Please, just trust me on this one. The chopped black olives and fresh lemon wedges for squeezing are key. Collectively they add dimension, surprise bursts of flavor and nuance you don't get otherwise. And a chunk of toasted, crusty artisan bread is the perfect sidekick.
Lastly, the recipe has you make your own celery salt. It couldn't be easier, and any leftover sea salt is great sprinkled on any number of things - eggs, potatoes, soups, you name it. The trick is finding celery with lots of leaves still intact. I stumbled on a bunch of heirloom celery this time around with endless leaves, but this is atypical. It seems like grocers "top off" most celery leaves. That said, I can always find celery with a few leaves intact, and there are generally more leaves hiding in the heart of the celery - so I use those to make the celery salt. Works just fine.
Source: http://feeds.101cookbooks.com/~r/101Cookbooks/~3/HbnW6ADuofQ/christmas-lima-bean-stew-recipe.html
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