Butternut Bean Soup

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Photo: iStock / Thinkstock

Yield: Serves 4
Time: 40 minutes prep, 40 minutes cooking, 1 hour 20 minutes total

Ingredients

Soup:

1-1/2 cups dried white beans, soaked overnight and drained
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tablespoon thyme
1 tablespoon sage
4 teaspoons rosemary
3 medium portabella mushroom caps, sliced (optional)

2 butternut or Hubbard squash, halved lengthwise and seeded
Olive oil

Instructions

1. Combine the beans, garlic and spices in a large saucepan, add water to cover amply and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, or until beans are tender and most of the water has cooked off. Add mushrooms toward the end.

2. While beans are cooking, drizzle a large roasting pan with olive oil and arrange squash skin side down. Cook at 400 F for about 40 minutes, or until fully tender when pierced with a fork. Remove from oven and serve each half squash filled with a generous scoop of bean soup.

Reprinted with permission from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2008). Copyright 2008 by Barbara Kingsolver.

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Steven Hopp

Steven Hopp is the founder and director of the Meadowview Farmers Guild. He is the co-author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and has published papers in bioacoustics, ornithology, animal behavior and sustainable agriculture. He is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Emory & Henry College.

Camille Kingsolver

Camille Kingsolver is an advocate for the local-food movement and co-author of the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is an author and freelance writer. She has written numerous novels, including The Poisonwood Bible (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Orange Prize, and winner of the national book award of South Africa), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (winner of the James Beard award), and The Lacuna (winner of the Orange Prize). She has contributed to more than 50 literary anthologies, and has had reviews and articles published in major newspapers and magazines. Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, received the National Humanities Medal in 2000, and was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011. She established the PEN / Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.