This morning I felt like doing something, so after glancing in the fridge to see what was laying around--a small chunk of ham about 2 x 5 inches, an onion getting pretty old and a fennel bulb doing likewise all registered, I wandered into the pantry and found a bag of mung beans. They're those little perfectly round peppercorn-sized green beans you see in Asian markets.
I had never had mung beans that I knew of prior to a long ago roommate getting a visit from a beautiful Malaysian girl he'd known in in a previous life. She was a very well-educated health afficianado who had come to the U.S. to spend two weeks in the Pritikin program (an ultra-strict no-salt, no-fat lifestyle turnaround program for people with heart disease) in Santa Monica with a plan to develop her own version of that program back in Kenya.
She made a mung bean soup for us, and it was the most hypnotically complex bean soup I've ever had. It was loaded with fresh garlic and fresh ginger, among many other things. Hers was vegan and mine wasn't because I had that ham to spend, but I was otherwise stayed fairly true to my memory of her soup's profile by adding ginger, coriander, cumin, mint, orange peel and curry leaves in addition to the diced onion and fennel. I ended up adding a teaspoon of curry powder and then two of Hungarian paprika to develop a pleasing orange hue--I had what I would guess to be about 1.25 pounds of beans, they came from a bulk seller, so it wasn't a set packaged amount. Hers might have had coconut milk in it as I remember hers being lighter in color than what I made, but even without it my soup did end up with that tropical spice flavor that's similar to Indian but not as heavy.
I also added Trader Joe's 20-spice blend, which I bought hoping it was the salt substitute Christina recommended--this was the closest thing our store had to something that might work as a salt substitute. (I'm trying to use less.) I haven't used it in that capacity per se--I'm just resisting the urge to add salt to things when I normall would--but it sure adds a nice, unspecific complexity to lots of foods.
Anyway, I made a truly wonderful soup. If you've never used mung beans, you really should try them sometime. They have a great mouthfeel that's actually quite refined due to their small size, and they're not as starchy as conventional beans. They don't turn pasty.