Cuban Black Bean Soup

As I have mentioned before, I am trying to add more vegetarian dishes into our diet, not because I hate meat, but because it's so cheap to buy beans. So this is the recipe I made for supper. It's from the Everything Soup cookbook. There is a lot of black bean consumption in Haiti too. So we need to get used to that.

Cuban Black Bean Soup
1 lb dried black beans
4 cups cooked white rice
1 onion
1 red pepper
1 green pepper
1 tbsp butter
4 cups beef broth (of course if you use beef broth this won't be strictly vegetarian...just use vegetable)
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 cup rum (optional)(ha ha)

Soak the beans overnight in cold water, then drain. Cook the rice if you don't have leftovers. Chop the onion and dice the red and green peppers (separately). In a soup pot, heat the butter. Add onion and saute for 3 minutes. Add the beans, broth, bay leaves, thyme, oregano, and red pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook for 1 1/2 hours.

Remove about 1 cup of the beans with a slotted spoon and place them in a bowl. Mash them. Add them back into the soup pot, stirring a bit until the mixture thickens. Discard the bay leaves. Add the rum and green pepper. Cover and simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

Divide the rice among the serving bowls and pour the soup over the top. 6 servings.

(If you saute the veggies in olive oil instead of butter, this will be dairy free, too.)

I only made half the amount of rice, because the kids will all eat it now, but don't love it. Also I made it with brown rice instead of white. Once the soup was on the rice, this looked very like food we have eaten in Haiti before. I wish it tasted better. It didn't taste bad, just kind of bland, I thought. I tried adding salt, but then it just tasty kind of bland and salty. All the kids ate it though. Sam gave it a 3 out of 5 stars. Steve said 3 or 4. I said a solid 3. So Sam calculated that the average rating for this recipe is 3.1. Not sure that's exactly right mathematically speaking, but I think fairly accurate for how we liked it. Maybe the rum would have helped...?