SOUP!

When the nights start turning cool, like they have this week, I start thinking about big pots of soup for supper. You will soon see recipes for vegetable soup, bean soup, potato soup, whatever sounds good today. But today, I think White Chili sounds best.

Dry beans or canned work well, but I will be using canned today because I didn't think to soak beans last night. Drain and rinse the beans, add a couple cans of chicken broth, a small can of chopped green chiles, and a large can of chicken is easiest, but a rotisserie chicken or (my personal favorite) a pit barbecued chicken, cleaned up and chopped are tastiest. Add garlic powder, onion powder and chili powder and let simmer. If you like it really spicy, a couple drops of hot sauce or a chopped jalapeno can add that. You can cook this up quickly using canned beans, but the longer it simmers the better it will be.

I like to make Mexican corn bread to go with this. Preheat the oven to 425, add oil to the pan you are cooking this in and let in heat in the oven. Mix 2 cups self rising cornmeal, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 egg, 2 T oil, 1/2 cup sour cream and enough milk to make a pourable batter, add 1 can creamed corn and a finely chopped jalapeno pepper. Pour 1/2 the batter into a hot pan (I use a cast iron skillet), sprinkle 3/4 -1 cup shredded cheese on the batter and pour the rest of the batter over the cheese. Bake about 30 minutes, until quite brown on top.

Sprinkle a little cheese over the soup when you serve it. Enjoy!