{Pressure Cooker} Lima Bean & Ham Soup

This delicious {Pressure Cooker} Lima Bean & Ham Soup combines my 2 favorite foods; Soup and Lima Beans.  Growing up I hated soup. While I wasn’t a typical picky eater, I would turn my nose up at even the idea of eating SOUP for dinner. My poor mother. I’m sure when she hears me now say that soup is my favorite category of food, she is disgusted with me.

Lima beans have ALWAYS been my favorite vegetable, but we’re not talking dried or canned lima or butter beans… I’m talking about tender, green, lima beans, most often referred to as baby lima beans. Lima beans were a special part of my childhood, my grandmother grew them in her garden and they were a fixture at all holiday and special occasion meals.

Gram would painstakingly sort each lima bean by size to be Baby, Regular or Soup. The baby beans were reserved for holiday meals, the regulars we had more frequently and the largest beans, which were still fresh and tender, were the beans that started to lose their vibrant green color for more of a white/yellow color and were a little less sweet.

Ray and I have continued the tradition of growing lima beans in our garden, he fell in love with them at first bite. Their sweet, buttery taste is what motivates him to shuck & sort beans for hours on end. (I hit the jackpot ladies – my hubby enjoys shucking lima beans!)

And this year has been a banner lima bean season, with our harvests YTD of well over 10 gallons of lima beans (shucked and frozen – click HERE to learn how I freeze them) and we still have one final harvest before our first frost – most of which will be dried to plant next year or large beans for delicious soups like this delicious {Pressure Cooker} Lima Bean & Ham Soup!

Since the vast majority of you aren’t sitting around with a freezer full of homegrown lima beans, you can still enjoy this soup by using frozen lima beans from the store. You don’t need the more expensive baby lima beans, just go for a basic frozen lima bean (but babies will work too if that’s your thing).

This delicious {Pressure Cooker} Lima Bean & Ham Soup comes together quickly but has all the flavors of old-fashioned, slow cooked soup since it’s made in a pressure cooker. The actual active participation time for you is less than 10 minutes – leaving you with about 50 minutes of unattended cooking time you can use to do something else like helping your kids with their homework or reading a book.

This yields 14 cups of soup, enough for a family sized dinner plus leftovers for lunch the next day. Doesn’t it look positively delicious???

Oh and one last thing – for those of you who are like – What? Lima Beans? aren’t beans/legumes a no-no if you are “paleo” — Here’s my take on Lima Beans and all other Beans – I eat fresh, tender beans regularly (think green beans, peas and lima beans) in my mind they are just another vegetable  however I try to stay away from dried beans since they are more of a classical legume – does that make any sense?! Tender, Fresh beans don’t need soaked to make them digestible like dried beans do. And at the end of the day, green beans, peas and lima beans aren’t reactive for us so they work for our own personal ‘paleo’ template, it’s up to every individual to determine what works for them!