Portuguese Bean Soup

At the New Year's party, one of Sak's aunts made Portuguese bean soup that I totally fell in love with.  Apparently it's not really a Portuguese dish though, more like a Portuguese dish that Hawaii took and made their own. Which is always good, cause Hawaiian food rocks.

Well, when I got home I ran to the church cookbook to see if there was a recipe. Nope. So I looked in this Hawaii cookbook (What Hawai'i Likes to Eat) my brother got me a year ago, compiled by the local newspaper:

It was there! Yay!  I looked for the recipe online but couldn't find it to share.  This one, however, is very similar (Just the number of potatoes and carrots are different and they used more sausage than ham hocks.)

Anyway, I'd never worked with ham hocks before. They are kinda crazy. I dunked two of them in a stock pot along with my Portuguese sausage (aka linguica, or you can use chorizo) , covered them with water and cooked them on low for about two hours.

Take the hocks out and cut the meat off, discarding the bones and cartilage. This was ridiculously hard so I'm pretty sure I did it wrong. :P  Anyway, put the meat back in, along with stew veggies:

And cabbage:

After the veggies are softish, check your water level. I took a couple cups of water since it looked a bit too watery. Make it the consistency you would like!

Next add beans and tomato sauce.  Not pictured was also a can of stewed tomatoes I threw in last minute as well.

All done! Add salt and pepper to taste.

The ham hock meat is so delicious, and I love the cabbage and stewed tomatoes. I think maybe it could've used a third can of kidney beans, but Sak disagrees since he's not a huge bean fan. It was even better the next day after everything soaked up nicely.

Yum. Soup is always the perfect freezing-cold-day solution!