Lima Bean and Ham Hock Soup

I got hungry for my mom's cooking yesterday and made her Lima Bean and Ham Hock soup with a few additions. Mom was a scratch cook (even canned her own tomatoes, etc.) She learned to cook from Grandma Newlin, my dad's mom, who was a farm girl and a great cook. Mom and Dad got married when they were 15 and 17 years old. Mom's parents disowned her for a long time and so it was up to Grandma Newlin to get the newlyweds off to a good start. My identical twin brothers were born 10 months into the marriage so they really needed her help. I don't know how Mom managed when they finally moved into their own apartment, a cold water flat on the third floor in downtown Omaha. By then she was 19 years old and the mother of three with another well on the way. At least the water was inside the apartment (they shared a hot water bathroom with everyone else on the third floor) unlike the farm where the water was outside at the well and the outhouse was some distance from the house. Those Nebraska winters could be very cold. They eventually moved from the apartment two years after one of my twin brothers died at age 3. My sister was 3, I was 4 and my remaining brother was 5 when we began our life of traveling around with a road paving crew in our little 16 foot Howard trailer, changing schools as much as 5 times a year. But, that is a story for another posting. This is about soup.

If you want to make my mother's lima bean and ham hock soup, really my Grandma Newlin's recipe, you will need 2 cups of dried lima beans (rinsed, sorted and soaked overnight); 3 ham hocks; 1 large, diced onion; 3 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled; 4 tomatoes, peeled and diced (or if you must, a 14.5 oz. can); 3 sliced carrots; 3 sliced celery stalks; pepper (the ham hocks usually are salty enough); and finally 1/4 C chopped parsley leaves. Put everything together in a pot, cover generously with water and cook all day. I added the zest and juice of one lemon; Herbs from Provence with Lavender (Morton & Bassett, San Francisco); and at least 1 C of a nice white wine. Add salt, if needed, at the end of cooking time. I never need to do that. If someone unexpected showed up at dinner time, my mother would throw in a few diced potatoes. Also, since Grandma Newlin came to America on the boat from Ireland and she had lots of people to feed every night, she always added the potatoes. I love potatoes so I do too.

I love this soup, or chowder, or stew, or whatever it is. When I shopped for the ingredients to make soup, I was using a recipe I got at Mandy's house this last visit. It had boneless, skinless turkey thighs instead of ham hocks. It also had the white wine and lemon zest and juice that I added to mom's recipe. I did make Mandy's healthy recipe and it was good but it only made me hungry for the real thing. I missed the tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, celery and mostly the ham hocks. So now I have healthy soup in the freezer and artery clogging, blood pressure raising, delicious soup in my tummy. And I feel like I spent an afternoon in my mom's kitchen.