Turkey and Kidney Bean Soup

Where my soup lovers at?!  I got a soup for YOU today!

Ground Turkey and Kidney Bean Soup.

This one will leave you warm, filled, and guilt-free.  The ingredients are simple, but all of them together create harmony in a bowl.

Here’s what you will need to start:

The ingredients above are flexible.  For instance, you can use half the amount of onion, two cloves of garlic instead of three if you don’t like too much garlic, more (or less) salt.  The one thing I would recommend though, is to get good quality bay leaves.  Until recently I used to pick the cheapest brand of bay leaves and be happy with that.  These days however, I’m finding myself enjoying organic and quality products so much more.  You know the saying “you get what you pay for?”  It definitely holds true in the quality of food.  Especially with spices!  Flavors are so much richer! The bay leaf I used here is from Simply Organics and let me just say, the money spent on this jar of bay leaves was worth every penny.

Now before I continue, I need to give you a heads up.  This is a two part recipe.  It sounds like a lot of work, but the first part is done by your crockpot.  The second part is putting it all together, and that should take about 50 minutes.

For the second part you will need…

First and foremost – get those beans cookin’!

First sort through the beans to make sure there are no bad ones, then rinse them.  Combine the beans, onion, salt, garlic, and bay leaf in a crockpot with 8 cups of water.  Set the crockpot to cook the beans according to your schedule.  For example, I set mine for 4 hours (which would be on high), because I knew I would return to the soup in that amount of time.  If you work a full-time job, you’ll want to set your crockpot on low to cook while you are gone if you’ve done that before, or make this over the weekend.  The most important thing here is to make sure you have the beans fully cooked by the time you are ready to bring it all together.

Once the beans are fully cooked, remove and discard the bay leaf.

For the onions and garlic pieces (if there are any solid pieces left), you can either take them out and discard them as well, or you can leave them as is if you like.  I chose to skim them out of the beans with a slotted spoon and add some of the pieces to the pot that I would be finishing the soup in.  If you choose not to use the onions or garlic, just start cooking the ground turkey meat as you normally would in a large pot.

Add the lean ground turkey meat to the onions and garlic and cook on medium heat until all the meat is fully separated and there are no large chunks of ground meat left.  Cut through and mash the onions along with the meat as it cooks.

Add the chopped carrots and celery (it’s okay if the meat is not completely cooked yet) .  Continue cooking the meat with the vegetables for 10 minutes.

Chop the parsley well and add it to the pot.  I remove the stems, but you don’t have to.

Stir everything well and cook again for another 2-3 minutes.

Next, use a ladle to transfer the entire pot of beans and bean broth to the pot of meat and vegetables.

Stir it up and smell all that goodness.

Simmer partially covered on low to medium-low heat for 25 minutes.

Serve hot with homemade corn tortillas or simply top with freshly diced avocado.

Let me know your thoughts or questions below!  I hope you enjoy!