I have been trying to post this for quite awhile, weeks really.  I thought the timing today was good as alot of people have leftover ham after Easter and this is a great easy way to use it up.  Don’t throw out that ham bone!  We had a ham bone in the freezer from Christmas (that a friend had leftover and was going to throw out, so I took it home to freeze).  I decided I would try to make a slow cooker white bean soup to use it up before it was too old and ended up in the garbage. I am not good with freezer cooking and I often put things in the freezer with the best of intentions, but then never use them and they end up freezer burnt.

A couple of notes, you will need to soak the beans overnight and our ham bone as frozen so we thawed that in the fridge overnight as well.

Here are the ingredients that my helper wrote out so we would remember what we added:

1 ham bone with some leftover ham attached

8 cups water

We placed the thawed ham bone in the slow cooker. Put in the white beans (which had been soaked overnight).  FYI-the garlic was minced. Threw everything else in on top of that, poured in the water and cooked for about 6-7 hours on high (you could do 8- hours on low).

At the end of the cooking time, carefully lift out the bone and cut off some bits of meat to add back to the pot. We don’t like ham very much so I didn’t add much back to the pot, but add back as much as you would like to suit your taste.  Try it for flavour at this point and add a little more salt if needed.

After all day cooking you have this tasty very frugal soup, that went great with crusty bread