I hope you're having a nice week. Fancy some bean soup?

Ever since I saw @Qurator's call for submissions of your "oldest recipe" for the Hive Top Chef competition, I've been thinking hard, trying to remember.

The truth is that it's very difficult to know which one is the oldest, but I do remember that more than 20 years ago, I used to make this recipe for my little one, who is now a young adult. I taught him to eat spicy food since he was a toddler 🔥🍼💪😁 You see, hot chili peppers, black pepper, and hot paprika are never missing in my kitchen.

Understanding that this is either my own recipe or one that I've adopted, I have to say that this one is ideal, since it came about from inventing a bean soup with the ingredients I had in the fridge. The only difference you'll see is that this one has pumpkin instead of noodles; I used to put egg noodles in it when I made it for my son, but I'm not eating them for a good while, so pumpkin.

Then this is my oldest recipe for bean soup: spicy red bean soup with ground beef and bacon. Hope you like it 😄

INGREDIENTS

For 4 servings

• 200 gr red beans, soaked overnight
• 200 gr ground beef
• 100 gr bacon
• 2 cups chopped tomato, ripe
• 2 cups chopped onion
• 1 cup chopped red bell pepper
• 1 cup chopped green bell pepper
• 1/2 cup chopped chili pepper
• 3 tablespoons freshly minced garlic* 150 gr pumpkin
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon hot paprika
• 2-3 bay leaves
• salt to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• a touch of sugar (optional). I was going to but I didn't use it this time because the soup was sweet enough.
• olive oil to saute
• freshly cracked black pepper to sprinkle on top of the served soup. You can add some cheese, too.

THE PROCESS

The beans

The beans should've been soaked from the day before. I left them overnight. This makes them softer and take much less time to cook.

I put them in water to cook, and when they boiled, I threw out that first batch of water. This is to eliminate as many antinutrients as possible. This helps us absorb the nutrients from the beans better.

Then, I put them in fresh water, to which I added salt, baking soda, a couple of flattened garlic cloves, and a couple of bay leaves. The baking soda makes the beans cook much faster. We just have to make sure to leave an opening when putting the lid on, so that we don't have a foam spill.

The stew

I chopped the onion first and sauteed it in hot olive oil in my wok, which is as old as this recipe. While the onion cooked, I chopped the red and green bell peppers, making sure to remove the seeds and veins to prevent them from making the soup bitter.

Then I chopped the chili peppers and used my pestle and mortar to mince the garlic. I added them in the cooking wok. Chopped the tomatoes and into the wok they went, too. I added some salt.

To finish this part, half, of the recipe, I added the rest of the spices: ground cumin, dried oregano which I crumbled, and hot paprika.

A power outage occurred at this point 😒 I went on anyway... Turned on the emergency lights.

I chopped the bacon into pieces of about 2 cm and added it in the wok along with the ground beef.

The stew was done in about 20 minutes.

Now it was time to add the cooked beans and pumpkin and let it cook down for another 20 minutes.

I like to add a few slices of bell pepper.

When the 20 minutes had passed, I removed the wok from the fire and let the soup sit for ten minutes.

I wished my son was here at this point, but he's been living in another country for the last eight years. That's a whole different story, a Venezuelan story like many... But he's an excellent cook, if you wish to know; he recreates many of my recipes and create new ones for his girlfriend now 😄❤️

It was a pleasure for me to share this old recipe with you. I hope you like it!

Bon appetit!

Here, with some black pepper & cheese 😋