Black bean soup – warm, spicy, brimming with chicken, beans and vegetables – is a dish that everyone can appreciate. There’s nothing quite like a nourishing black bean soup on a cold winter’s afternoon, that, when paired with a salad of fresh winter greens and full-bodied unrefined olive oil, makes for a fully satisfying meal. A good black bean soup is both hearty and delightful, and decidedly filling. This black bean soup combines homemade mineral-rich broth with chicken while the addition of salsa and chipotle chile powder provides a lovely heat.
While legumes rarely make it to our supper table anymore; we still enjoy a good black bean soup. Black beans offer a good source of food folate – a B vitamin that’s critical to reproductive health and fetal development. Indeed, low maternal intake of food folate is connected to birth defects – particularly neural tube defects though some evidence indicates low levels of folate are also implicated in cleft palate and heart defects as well.
This version of black bean soup is easily prepared and, when you’re working from pre-cooked ingredients, the soup requires fewer than a thirty minutes to prepare. Rather than using canned beans in this black bean soup, try preparing a large batch in advance by soaking dry beans in warm and slightly acidified water for 24 hours, draining them and then cooking them in a slow cooker until tender. Freeze beans for easy use later.
© Jenny for Nourished Kitchen, 2010. |
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Post tags: beans, birth defects, black beans, chicken, chile, chili, cleft palate, family bites, folate, folic acid, Foodbuzz, legumes, onion, salsa
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