Inaugural week: 15 Bean Soup

I eat soup almost every single day for lunch. My friends at work make fun of me eating the same meal everyday, but truthfully nothing is more comforting than a hot bowl of soup. Why I have to defend a healthy, low-calorie yet filling lunch is a mystery.  


 I'm creating this new blog for more than my love of soup. A combination of events inspired me. My husband decided a few weeks ago that we should go on a diet. No problem, I can still eat soup for lunch. I agreed since we could both stand to lose a little weight. Roger calls it "The Caveman Diet". We aren't doing anything drastic really. We just try to stick to natural foods. It includes meat and vegetables, though we eat some dairy, fruits and nuts too. We emphasize protein and try  to avoid carbohydrates and sugar when we can.  


After some weight loss an unwelcome side-effect accompanied this diet- our grocery bill. Besides being enthusiastic about our fitness of late, Roger also has a cheapskate streak in him. We are both starting grad school in the fall, so that's probably a good thing anyway... It turns out that buying fresh meat and fruits and vegetables is more expensive than buying processed food. Roger did some analyzing of our groceries to find that even at lucky sale prices we spend $1.50 a can and therefore more than $80 a month on soup.  


 And now we get to the point. Because of our more expensive diet and our conflicting need to save money, Roger thinks that we can create a soup for all of the lunches for the week that is three-quarters to half the cost of the cans but still only a few hundred calories per serving. Our goal is to make 10 to 14 servings of soup every Sunday that costs somewhere between $10 and $15 but for 500 calories or less per serving.


We chose our first soup because it is something that we know and love already: 15-Bean Soup. The recipe is from the back of the 15-Bean mix but adapted to cook in a crockpot, but feel free to follow the bag's instructions if that makes you more comfortable with a stove pot or don't own a crockpot.  


15-Bean Soup 
approximately 285 calories per serving  
makes 12 1-cup serving 
Between $7 to $9 total 


1 lb. bag of grocery-store mix  of 15 beans  
14 ounces of the sausage of your choice (We used a pork/beef combo.) 
14.5 ounce can of chili-style diced tomatoes   (substitute: regular diced tomatoes with a tsp.of chili powder)
1 cup of onion (chopped) 
4 cloves of garlic (pressed) 


 Soak the beans overnight. Drain and rinse the beans.  Combine all ingredients with 2 quarts of water in a large crockpot. Allow soup to simmer on high for 5 to 8 hours.