Ingredients:
1 large onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
3 1/2 cups diced mushrooms
4 cups cubed cottage ham
9 oz fresh or frozen Fordhook lima beans
1 tablespoon Herbes de Provence
6 cups chicken stock

Directions:
Saute the ham in a bit of butter in a Dutch oven until just starting to brown. Add the onion, carrot, potatoes, celery, mushrooms and spices and saute until the potatoes are getting soft, about 10 minutes. Add the stock and lima beans. Simmer until the potatoes are fully cooked, about 20 minutes.

My thoughts:

I’ve been hard at work at my latest book and haven’t been cooking a lot of non-book related food lately. However, today I was snowed in and got a lot of work done so I made this soup for dinner. I’ve been on a bit of a lima bean kick and was going to make a more straight-forward lima bean soup but I am (hoping! see: snow) heading to Birmingham this weekend for FoodBlogSouth so I ended up putting in a bunch of other stuff too so it didn’t go to waste. I’m glad I ended up using all of those mushrooms because the resulting soup is so rich tasty. Perfect for a cold snowy day.