Easy Italian Bread

As with so many other areas of life, America has a rich tradition when it comes to baking.  I think that this is because American culture draws upon the traditions of so many other cultures.  Here in America, we make everything from fluffy white Italian and French style breads to hearty rye breads from Germany and Eastern Europe.  We make bagels, bread sticks, and buns.  We do dumplings, tortillas, and pitas.  We make sweet breads and savory breads from all over the world.  The best breads, however, come from the home kitchen.

I learned to make bread as a teenager.  I wish that could romanticize that it was because of some deep human instinct or some other such nonsense.  The truth of the matter, though, was that I decided to learn to make bread because I had this empty spot on a goal sheet for a church youth program and "learn to make bread" seemed like the least obnoxious of the various options.  It was also the least expensive by far of any of the cooking options, which pleased my mother.  You can make a whole lot of different kinds of bread with just a handful of basic pantry ingredients.  Sure, you can make expensive bread--every category of cooking has its outliers.  The German bread that I worked on last year had several cups of seeds per batch.  That set us back a bit.  But as I said before, there are hundreds of recipes for bread that call on the baker to use just a few basic, inexpensive ingredients.

Vegetarian Black Bean Soup

Disney is very generous with their recipes.  I can't think of any other business that employs so many top chefs and hands out recipe cards with such wild abandon.  (Notice that there are no Disney recipes in the Top Secret Recipes line of cookbooks.)  This is good news for home cooks because it means that we can recreate beloved favorites, restaurant quality meals, and try new mouth-watering dishes many miles away from Disney's theme parks and resorts.

This recipe, from Shutters at Old Port Royale at Disney's Caribbean Beach resort is one of the easiest to recreate at home.  It's one of my favorites of the hundreds of recipes that I have tried from the web pages with Disney recipes and the Disney cookbooks in the last year for several reasons.  First, it's relatively inexpensive.  (Most of the handful of recipes that we haven't tried yet use cuts of meat or seafood that are either hard to procure in our little college town, expensive, or both.)  Second, it's fairly easy to put together.  And finally, for a vegetarian dish that is very, very good for you, it is also very tasty.  This soup got seven enthusiastic thumbs up (well, okay... six and a half) and has made several repeat appearances.  It even got taken over to a cousin of ours, a student at the local college, who managed to develop pneumonia last summer.  It's just that good.