Try the gray stuff, it's delicious!

Today Beaner and I made some black bean soup. We got the recipe from here, but I kind of feel like black bean soup, like guacamole, is more a process of combining loosely confederated parts than a recipe.

For example, the recipe calls for two 15 oz cans of black beans. We had three cans amounting to 53.5 ounces of beans. So we decided the only logical thing to do was to add all of them. And to throw in some panchetta because why not.

An interesting note on pancetta: if you throw it in the pan kind of furled up (we decided to chiffonade ours) it will open like a flower before your very eyes!

A few other notes on the process:

1) It might have been an intelligent to saute the carrots first instead of the onions, because those babys were just this side of raw.
2) If you don't have anything resembling a blender, mugging some of the beans with a spoon seemed to work okay for Bean.
3) The recipe says the soup should look like this:

But in our experience it looked a hell of a lot more like this:

Only even grayer and we didn't have the classy avocados. 

And it still tasted REALLY good. It also only took us forty-five minutes to make, and we were kind of distracted, and about half of those minutes were spent watching it bubble like swamp ooze. Might it develop a deeper, richer flavor and a more appealing color if left to stew longer? Perhaps. We will never know because we only had an hour to cook and eat before going to work and class.

Yet another victory for Nug and Bean! And we have enough leftovers to feed the population of Sri Lanka!