What's for Dinner?

I normally post a ton of pics when I post a recipe, but this one only has a finished pic, because I hadn't really planned on sharing it.  Why not?  Because this was a cleaning out the frig meal.  It was so well received, though, that I thought I'd share it anyway.  So here's my cleaning out the frig Ham & Pea Soup with Kale, Potatoes, and Beans.

I started with dry great northern beans and soaked them in the morning.  You can soak dry beans over night(6-8hrs), start them in the morning before heading out for your day, or alternatively boil them for an hour and let them sit for another hour.  You also could use canned, but rinse them thoroughly, because they're pretty salty.  I like using dry beans, because it's an awful lot of protein bang for your buck.

I started the soup by throwing the hambone left from dinner with the in-laws into a stock pot of water and fired up the stove.  I used enough water to cover the hambone.  While the water was heating up I peeled and chopped up 1 large onion and 6 or 7 medium potatoes and added them to the pot.  I then added the presoaked beans to the pot and allowed the soup to simmer away.  I added a good several shakes of ground white pepper and garlic powder to the soup.

When the potatoes were cooked through, I ladled out 3 scoops of potatoes & beans to my blender and pureed them, enough to make the soup creamy, but still leaving plenty whole in the soup.  If I had an immersion blender I'd have just done this step in the pot.  I added the pureed potatoes & beans back to the stock pot.  I added 2 cups of frozen peas to the stock pot and pulled out the ham bone and shredded the meat off of it.  I added the shredded ham back to the stock pot and added about 3 cups of kale(it seems like a lot before it all wilts down.)  I let that simmer for another minute or 2 and the soup was done.

WD sucked his bowl down in about 2 minutes flat and declared that it was creamy and delicious.  SB had 2 helpings and requested leftovers be packed in a thermos for lunch the next day.  It turns out that while the boys aren't huge fans of sauteed kale, they like it in soup.  Yay!

Thanks for popping in and cleaning out the frig with me.  I'm linking this up to Gluten-Free Homemaker's Gluten-Free Wednesday, Real Sustenance's Seasonal Sunday,  and Celiac Teen is hosting Go Ahead Honey, it's Gluten-Free.