This recipe is really a two-fer in that it really is a dish created for using up leftover bean soup when you are sick of eating the same bean soup after multiple days (at least that’s why I made it).  It’s a dish that uses both tomato sauce and chicken stock (though vegetable stock would be fine), vegetables typical in soups, cooked beans, and hearty herbs to infuse the whole thing.

The leftover soup is then ladled into a an earthen casserole dish and slow cooked for several hours in a low temperature oven.  After that, you simply make the topping, crank the heat to brown the top and you are done!  Cooking it on low heat over a longer period of time allows the soup to really thicken into something resembling an actual baked bean dish.

I’ve been meaning to mention this as well.  If you find cooking dried beans or making braises too time consuming given your schedule, you can use a pressure cooker.  In a fraction of the time, you can achieve great results with dishes that typically take hours to cook.  It’s a fairly pricey investment…about $100 or so but if you like slow cooked meals and are always short on time, it might be a great thing to consider.  They are fairly easy and straight-forward to use as well.  Anyway, recipe and more pictures follow after the jump… Continue reading →