My Mom Will be Proud

...maybe?!

Like most everyone else I know, we had ham for Easter lunch. In past years, I would just pick the bone as clean as I could and toss it. I have never used it to make ham and bean soup.

Here's why: My mom LOVES bean soup (as we called it) and we ate it very frequently when I was growing up. Well, one of the things that my late father and I have in common, is that he hated and I try to avoid eating any type of bean (except green beans). (Which to me proves there is a genetic connection to food preferences since the last time I saw him, I was 15 months old!) Of course, like any good parent, my mom would make me eat the foods I disliked. I can remember sitting at the table for hours trying to eat the bean soup. I decided that when I grew up, I wouldn't cook the things that I didn't like.

Well, it seems I forgot to give the complete food quiz to Mr. TD before we got married. (You would have thought in the 8 years before we married, we would have covered the "bean" topic, but I just don't remember it coming up...) Wouldn't you know it, but he likes beans...all kinds of them (and okra too, but that's a whole 'nother topic)! The last time I threw out the ham bone, he requested that I make ham and bean soup.

This time, after cleaning the ham from the bone, I decided to save it to make soup for Mr. TD. Today was the day. It was rainy, stormy really, and I thought it would be a good night for soup. I simmered the hock for about an hour in chicken stock with onions and bay leaves. I removed the hock, added the chopped ham I had cleaned from the bone, matchstick carrots, northern beans and white corn (I just had a can in the pantry, so I thought I would use it), seasoned it with garlic pepper and let it simmer for another hour or two. It smelled wonderful!

The little TD's really don't like soup and Little TD doesn't like beans (hmmm...I wonder where he gets that!), so we gave them the option of eating the soup or something else. They chose something else. This is not something that we usually do, but I was having to work up the nerve to eat it, so I didn't have the heart to make them eat it if I wasn't totally thrilled. Mr. TD said it was good. He said it was more "hammy" than what you get in the can...go figure, but he liked it. I fixed me a bowl. It was too hot to eat at first, so I let it cool a bit, and then took a bite.

It WAS good! It tasted waaayy better than what my mom made (Sorry mom. But hey, I DID eat bean soup!) I had a bowl and a few crackers and I even had milk left over at the end of the meal. (You know, that old trick of drowning what you don't like in your drink and swallowing it whole...I didn't have to do that!)

Now that I am "older" (no age comments necessary), I am doing so many of the things my mom made me learn/do/eat when I was a kid that I absolutely despised: sewing, eating beans (ok, veggies in general)...I wonder what is next! It does give me hope that what I am saying to my kids might sink in someday...it just might take a really LONG time!!!