O Tidings of Comfort (Foods) and Joy!

You might call it "ham dinner in a bowl." For that's how it started, and that's how it ended! My husband baked a ham on Sunday morning and we had a fine ham dinner for lunch. By 1 p.m., I had all of my ingredients in the crock pot to make ham and bean soup, and it sat there on high, with me occasionally stopping by to stir it, for about 6 hours.

Making anything in a crock pot usually takes a while, and I started feeling like Robert Frost, telling my husband (who kept asking "When?") that "there'll be hours to go until there's soup." And even more hours beyond that. Honestly, it was almost a mini-series! (And in fact, Once Upon a Time in the West was concurrently on TV . . . and on . . . and on . . . and on.)

For the curious, here were my ingredients:
-one cooked ham hock, with some meat on it
-one cup diced ham
-a couple of potatoes, chopped up
-several carrots, diced
-most of one onion, diced
-three cups of bouillon broth (made with beef bouillon this time)
-three cans of a variety of beans (I used great northern, cannellini, and pinto)

The ham dinner was a winner, as the ham was a very tasty Sugardale one, and it turned out pulverized and almost flaky, like my mother's ham (or almost like pulled pork, it was that tender). So the prize goes to my husband for selecting, buying, and cooking the ham, without which none of this could be possible.

My timeline looked like this:
10 a.m. to 12 noon - husband bakes the ham
12 noon to 1 p.m. - ham dinner!
1 p.m. - all ingredients in crock pot, on high; stir occasionally
7 p.m. - turn off crock pot and unplug it
7:15 p.m. - remove ham hock and put it on a plate to cool
7:30 p.m. - remove all ham from ham hock, dice it up, and put ham back into soup; stir it all up good and put lid back on crock pot
8 p.m. - stir and serve soup; remove lid and let crock pot contents cool
9 p.m. - place remainder of soup into labeled and dated containers
10 p.m. - when soup is cool enough, refrigerate or freeze

So that was my comfort food story. What's yours!???

Here is our soundtrack song: Simon and Garfunkel, with Comfort and Joy (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen).