Hey You Pone-headed Crackpot!

So my hillbilly and/or southern friends keep talking about eating "soup beans"

No, not bean soup.

Soup Beans.

When I asked for a recipe, I got a vague description. Which was, essentially, "Ya cook beans and add some salt. And eat it with a pone."

Well, I was both suspicious and intrigued. I pressed for more information and found that some people season them with more than salt. Ham seasoning. I hadn't heard of that, either. Sounded a little creepy, actually. And I found that pintos or great northern beans are the favored beans. Folks used to cook it with their ham bones. And that there's no recipes. Just 'what my grandma used to do' and the like.

So I went to WalMart and found me a bag of beans labeled "HamBeens". Seriously. They looked to be pinto beans, with a packet of artificially flavored ham seasoning. And, just to be true to the not-recipes, I bought some additional "Ham flavored soup base" and some actual ham. With bones. It was hard to find a small amount of ham-with-bone that wasn't sliced. But I did it.

Now you know me, I cook without recipes all the time. Which is to say, I read a lot of recipes and then kimodify them until they bear little semblance to any originals. But starting with NO recipe to make something I've never seen nor tasted? That was a little harder.

So I rinsed the beans last night, and then soaked them overnight. This morning I poured off the soaking water, rinsed them, and put them on to slow-cook, covering them with about 2 inches of water, in my crock pot. Sometime in the evening I added a little onion, some garlic, and some of that "ham seasoning". And later the actual ham, diced up. I tried hard not to season it all to death, as I am wont to do, because I wanted it to be as close to authentic Soup Beans as I could make.

And I made me a pone of corn. Turns out pone means a round or oval cake. It's just cornbread. But they gotta call it something funny to make Northerners feel weird, I guess. I cooked it in my heavy skillet, to be as authentic as I could.

The Grand Lunar and I had our soup beans over our corn bread. I used my usual corn bread recipe, of which I am very fond. The kids had their corn bread on the side. All in all, most of us liked dinner okay. Two small children didn't really want to eat it. Although Baby Buzz had several servings. And it was quite filling. I might make it again. But certainly not weekly. Unless it grows on us. We'll see.