Three Sisters Soup

[nancylebov]

dcseain gave me a recipe for Three Sisters Soup a while ago, but this is a soup which is such an intrinsically strong idea that it doesn't need a recipe. The Three Sisters are corn, squash, and beans, the three primary foods of this continent--or maybe it's this hemisphere.

It's very good with chicken broth, and I expect it would be good with vegetable broth. Miso might be worth trying.

If you want to stay with the western hemisphere theme, use hot peppers for flavoring, but I used ginger and a spicy Italian mix this time, and it worked really well.

I suppose it would be more western hemispherish if you used turkey instead of chicken.

I was intrigued by the idea of spaghetti squash--I thought the texture would add something, but by the time it's been simmered, the spaghettiness of the squash doesn't make much difference.

To my mind, squash is pretty much squash and beans are pretty much beans. If you're a very good cook, you might have some ideas about the exact type of bean and squash, but I think any bean and squash will work well for flavor. I admit that the black beans I used this time gave it a funny color.

I threw in some dried woodear mushrooms. They worked. I bet veggies would work, too.

And it's easy. I baked the squash, but you can get canned squash. Canned corn (Trader Joe's is very nice) and canned beans are just fine. While the squash was baking, I put olive oil and chicken thighs in the pot, and turned up the gas high for a few minutes, then turned the thighs over and did a few minutes on the other side. Then I put in some chicken broth (also kindly made by some company), let it boil briefly, then threw in the squash, beans and corn, including the water from the canned items. And the ginger and spices and mushrooms, then I let it simmer until the smell was really tempting. That's it.

dcseain and I poked around at my idea of a three continents soup (a main ingredient and a flavoring from each of three different continents) but didn't some up with anything definitive.