experiments in cooking

i don't usually cook much...i can do stir-fry and pasta with pesto and a turkey pasta thing and a beef pasta thing (notice a theme?) and several other relatively simple dishes, but i don't have much variety in my repertoire and i tend to be too lazy to do anything that takes more than 40 minutes or so to deal with. i'll make curry sometimes, which takes longer, but i have to have planned for it in advance. today, david and i really felt like soup, so i pulled out my (never-before used) cookbook entitled "Cheap. Fast. Good!" with the terrible punctuations and all, and found a tortilla bean soup that sounded yummy. and it turned out great! we modified the recipe some, to better suit our bean and spice preferences. it turned out rather stew-like, which was fine but not entirely what we expected, but so yummy! and vegeterian, which is good since it's very cheesy and i'm trying to do the whole separate-meat-and-milk thing.

( here's the recipe from the book, and our changes to it )