Things wot I Made Then Ate: rice and beans

Showing posts with label rice and beans. Show all posts

Jasmine rice beef broth, Peru beans,

Jasmine rice is mildly fragrant but it's a poor choice for risotto due its thin starch coating needed to form a sauce. Still very good and intensely beef flavored. So are the beans. These would be side dishes in some restaurants but tonight they are dinner.

A nutritionist told me that rice and beans together form complete essential proteins and I believe her. The woman is smart and fierce.

Sweet potato, Anasazi beans and rice

The sweet potato is fine by itself. It makes it's own sugar, it's moist enough to not need any gravy. It doesn't need anything to help it.

But if you did add something then butter and and brown sugar would do.

The beans and rice are un believably delicious, if you ate them you'd go, "What? These are beans? I don't believe it." They're fine by themselves they don't need any sweet potato to jazz them up. They're fortified with butter and sweetened with a touch of brown sugar, and vinegar too at the end to adjust toward faint sweet/sour. Who knew gruel can be this delicious?

A nutritionist told me rice and beans together form complete proteins. This is 50/50, next time I'll use less rice.

Rice and beans with sausage

Honey, and rice vinegar added at end so that the beans are not toughened. The dry chiles are extremely uncomfortably hot like pliers smashing the tip of the tongue. The sausage is my own made of Kobe ground beef and ground lamb with cups of herbs that flavor everything they touch.

* small red beans
* small white beans
* cashews
* white rice
* chicken broth
* water
* wine

Cannellini beans with ham shank, red beans with bacon and molasses, rice, English muffin

One time I made such a gasket with kitchen towel paper and somehow forgot the whole pot of rice. It cooled on the stove. The next day upon removing the lid I discovered the paper made damp by starched up steam sank and dried in that position so that a stiff parabolic paper dome was formed.

Impressed with Nature's doings, I still had no immediate use for a stiff paper dome so I marveled and discarded it.

Beans and rice. There is an appreciable amount of meat on the smoked ham shanks and enough flavorful aspic to embody hearty soup.

Pork chile with rice and beans

No wait.

Dayidiz.

The axiom among chile elitists of Texas is, "Whoever puts beans in chile don't know beans about chile." They're against it. That attitude excludes this chile from competition. But I don't care, I'm not competing. The thing is, I have this rice and beans from down there ↓ that is pretty good but could be improved. So I get to think'n about enhancements and my mind goes naturally to chiles. Lot's of chiles. Different kinds. And then I go, "More meat too." And then I think how much I liked that green chile (that was red) from about five posts ago, and how it ran out too fast. And how even though it wasn't the best batch I ever made, how much I enjoyed it with fresh hand-made flour tortillas, and how oddly, and this is kind of a little teensy bit gross, how much it improved my entire GI tract, and by GI I don't mean soldiers.

Plus I'm still scrounging and seeking to clear out the freezer and the pantry or at least whittle the contents down some. I have two large pork roasts and one lamb roast. They're taking up room in the freezer that could be occupied by seafood and chicken. And ice cream.

One pork roast, cubed and fried.

One package of frozen Hatch chiles roasted road-side at one of those festive Hatch chile endeavors where New Mexico natives have branched out spreading the plenitude of the produce of their land and the good news of the gospel of these famed green wonders, improved through centuries of wise chile-husbandry. Or something.

The pork roast was bone-in. A bit of a problem cutting around the bone but not too bad. I did want to extract every last iota of porkly goodness off of and out of the bone. So into the pot it went.

If I had a dog, and gave that dog this bone, I'm certain it would look at me quizzically, like, "WTF? Couldn't you have left a little for me? Where's the marrow? I hate you."

Not really. Dogs totally appreciate every little thing, no matter how stingy.

* coriander

* cumin

* bay leaf

* Mexican oregano

* dried thyme

* sea salt

* excessive mad grinds of black pepper.

The Hatch chiles were insufficient. Could barely taste them. I added a medium size can of jalapeños. Tasted. Still insufficiently hot. Boy, beans must really soak up capsaicin. I added another smaller can of jalapeños. Tasted. Aún no es bien caliente. Still insufficiently hot. Plus it's kind of two-dimensional chile-wise. Added another small can of jalapeños plus the remainder of a small jar of habanero sauce, which amounted to two teaspoons, which expanded the chile profile to three types. Tasted. There. That did it.

I have my flour tortilla act DOWN. It is now second nature to whip them out, just enough for that one meal. This means I don't have to buy a dozen tortillas and then have the remainder around until they're gone, getting worse and worse with each passing day. I learned to cook them stovetop as briefly as possible in order to keep them soft and wonderful.

Rice and beans

It's January first, so what else? I think this supposed to be black-eye peas but I don't have any of those so I used pinto beans instead.

I invented this.

Hoisin is like a weird thick sweet jam. It's counterpunctual to salty soy sauce or tamari.

My pinto beans were dry and I didn't soak them so I pressure cooked them instead for the same amount of time the rice steamed in another pot. It was just a guess, and it worked.

Steamed a small amount of broccoli, fried a small chopped onion, added the mushrooms then all the other items. The thing is, I wanted vegetables to go with the beans and rice.