cooking

[redbird]

Tonight's dinner was black beans and rice, noteworthy only because I expected to be making this a lot during/because of the pandemic. Instead, I've made it a lot less often than in normal times: I have used two cans of black beans since March.

Very straightforward, though I used bacon instead of olive oil to saute the onions. (Cook the bacon, remove it, pour off some of the fat, and go on from there. Cut the bacon up, and add the pieces to the bowl of rice and beans after serving, along with the salsa (and, for cattitude, sriracha.) The salsa is Trader Joe's mild salsa, which is in fact mild enough for my current palate; Newman's Own used to be and no longer is.

Comments

[pameladean]

I too expected to make a lot of beans and rice, but so far I have not either. I am going through beans, though, because fish is mostly too expensive and I can make a dynamite black bean curry, kidney bean curry, or, best of all, black-eyed pea masala.

And we do have those and their vegetable sides over rice, but it is not actually "beans and rice," only literally so.

P.

[petrea_mitchell]

Sounds delicious!

[redbird]

It was good.

The starting point is a recipe that used to be printed on the Goya cans. I stopped buying Goya anything last spring, because they were so aggressively pro-Trump, but even if I didn't have this mostly memorized, I think it's on their website.

Their recipe calls for seasoning with oregano, garlic, and their "adobo sin annatto" spice blend; I looked at a bottle and it seems to be heavy on white and black pepper. So, I use garlic (fresh if I remember in time, which I didn't last night), oregano, and whatever else seems good. Last night that was cumin and ginger.

[otter]

Sounds tasty. One of our staples for a couple decades has been tortillas with beans and cheese (quesadillas, in other words). But Mouse has decided he won't eat it anymore. Sigh.

[redbird]

adrian_turtle and I regularly have tortillas with sweet potatoes and either fish or, less often, beans. (She can't eat dairy, alas.) Maybe I'll ask cattitude how he feels about quesadillas.

[otter]

I have some baked sweet potatoes in the fridge, but they are the purple outside/pale inside type and more starchy than I'd put with tortillas. Then again, I have rice in burritos. So many combinations to think about trying.