Pinto beans redux

Soupe aux fèves avec le pistou.

Pinto bean soup with pesto

That there's fancy talk for bean soup with pesto. The fun of this is making your own pesto. Why, oh why, oh why would you do that? So you can control it, is why. In this case, we controlled Parmigiano out of it because we didn't want to bother with Parmigiano today. And by we I mean me. And also to play with that stone smashy thing.

Redux means leftovers. Ha ha ha. See how easy it is to jazz it up?

The jiggly gelatin stuff at top is turkey aspic from the cracked bones of the turkey carcass. It's been sitting in the refrigerator all this time, safely stored covered in a tall two quart pitcher under its layer of chilled fat like a confit. But now that the fat has been removed, the aspic becomes vulnerable to exchange odors within the refrigerator, so I used half of it for this and froze the other half. I froze it broken up in chunks so it can be removed as needed.

The aspic was seasoned with thyme and sage, the beans already had bay in it and ham from the hoc but I added more ham from the honey baked quarter along with some precooked rice. This was all blended incompletely with the imersion blender stopping soon enough to leave chunks. Then a little more rice was added.

The garlic bulb had its top whacked off, drizzled with olive oil, wrapped in aluminum foil and roasted, as were the pine nuts, then muddled with fresh basil in a mortar and pedestal with olive oil added at the end, but no Parmigiano and no salt. I have commercial pesto but I don't like it. Now that I made my own, I have a good reason to toss out that awful crap. I knew better when I bought it, but it was an experiment. Fail! You know, I could take the remainder of that good hand-crushed pesto and add it to pasta for an unsurpassed flavoring that is full of win, and a million % of improvement over marinara. I still don't understand marinara. It sure must have had a great marketing team. Straight fresh tomatoes with olive oil is better, IMHO.

Checked for saltiness, then added a minute amount of sea salt at the table.