Some of you have reported hunting down my bean recipes. Well here are some of my faves, all gathered in one place! Just click on the image to get to the recipe.
Home-made refried beans! (Vegan, but you’d never know)
Five Minute Black beans – I KID YOU NOT – FIVE MINUTE PREP
Garbanzos con chorizo (chick peas and hot dry Spanish sausage)
Oh the sweet taste of victory!
My victory? My victory garden!
My little baby peppers
I managed to coax a couple of ajies (Capsicum chinense or sweet cooking peppers) from seeds that I saved from a pepper from my mom’s cousin’s kitchen garden in Mayaguez, to go with the recao (Eryngium foetidum or sawtooth coriander) that I grew from a seed packet from Puerto Rico. Next year I will be much more aggressive about how early I plant all my peppers, but for this year, the teeny-tiny-ness of my harvest does not diminish the absolute joy of it. Continue reading
I didn’t mean to make arroz con habichuelas last week, but when I dashed into a Latin supermarket for something else, I was stopped dead by the presence of something that looked pretty close to Puerto Rican pumpkin (or calabaza, as we call it). The Fates intervened with my dinner plans.
Native to the Americas, pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) has been an integral part of diets in this part of the world for thousands of years. The flesh and the seeds are used for many purposes. (in Mexico the crushed seeds are used to coat meats as you might use breadcrumbs). It is also one-third of the famed Three Sisters agricultural practice. Corn stalks make a trellis for beans, while pumpkin enjoys the shade underneath. Each plant supplies a nutrient to the soil that the other one needs, so the soil stays naturally healthy and fertile, while the produce provides invaluable nutrition to people. It just makes sense.
I have published this recipe before, but this time I include more substitutions if you don’t have a nearby source for Latin style ingredients. Check your “International foods” aisle for prepared sofrito – Goya has a wide reach and its sofrito is used by Caribbean Latin cooks all over, so you are in good company with this shortcut.
The new substitution of cooked ham steak for the salt pork reflects what I’ve been doing since I can’t find the kind of cooking pork I like. It is neat and tidy, fairly cheap, adds good flavor, and the extra can be frozen for another day (the cooked ham steaks are super-easy to chop fine or mince when frozen).
If you don’t find calabaza (and in fact the one that made me whip up this pot of beans was a Jamaican style and not quite what I like, but perfectly serviceable), acorn squash is my favorite substitute.
Note: With the leftovers I make quesadillas or nachos…yum. Also goes great with rotisserie chicken!
Don’t be put off by the number of ingredients; once you do the prep, you are almost done.
Ingredients
3. SOFRITO
(sofrito is the roux, the mirepoix, the basic saute seasoning of Puerto Rican cooking and is very difficult to reconstruct in the mainland U.S., which is why Goya makes a fortune selling it in jars. So if you can get most of the ingredients for sofrito at the local bodega/supermarket, then do this! –actually, quadruple or quintuple it and freeze it in ice cube trays for use later. Otherwise, buy commercial sofrito and use a couple of heaping tablespoons)
½ onion, minced (about ¾ Cup)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cubanelle (long green Italian cooking) pepper, seeded and diced
Five or six ajíes (non-spicy green peppers that look exactly like scotch bonnets/habaneros, but are not at all spicy! Taste them! They are hard to find but Latin supermarkets often have them), seeded and diced. Use another cubanelle – the redder the better — if you can’t get these.)
Five or six hojas de recao – culantro leaves- chopped. (Not to be confused with cilantro, these look like dandelion leaves without the curvy sides. They are hard to get, usually come from Costa Rica and their potency disappears quickly after cutting. I actually grow my own in the summer, which takes forever and yields very little in my part of the world. If you find them, use them as soon as you get them home! If you can’t find them, buy the sofrito WITH culantro)
3 Tbs tomato paste or Latin style tomato sauce/salsa de tomate (optional)
1 Tbs dried oregano (2 Tbs fresh)
2 Tbs chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
DIRECTIONS
While you are boiling the calabaza, heat the pork in a heavy pot. Cook it through and remove the scored rind. Leave the diced meat. Add a bit of olive oil, if necessary, then sauté the sofrito ingredients until tender, adding optional tomato at the end. Add beans. Add cooked calabaza and the reserved liquid. Cook for 15 minutes and serve on white or brown rice.
As much as I like my basic five-minute black bean recipe, (https://hotcheapeasy.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/five-minute-black-beans/)I do get bored with it occasionally and I also actually sometimes have more than five minutes (this prep takes maybe ten minutes).
On this occasion of boredom and time to spare, I had some chorizo and roasted red pepper doing nothing but getting old in my fridge, so I broke out of my box. The result was much, much better than I anticipated; the addition of chorizo added a silky umami sort of mouthfeel that was actually a bit like gravy. So give it a try; my son and I enjoyed the added spiciness and actually had it with rice one day and on tortilla chips topped with Monterey Jack cheese and lightly broiled the next day.
Black bean variation (with chorizo, roasted red pepper and oregano)
1.5 Tbs olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
3oz Spanish-style dry chorizo sausage, peeled and diced
1 Tbs roasted red pepper from a jar, drained and diced
1 29oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
2 tsp dry oregano
Heat olive oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan until fragrant. Add onion, stir to coat and lower heat to medium. Cook for five minutes. Add garlic, cook one minute. Add chorizo and cook until it starts to release color. Add red pepper, stir to coat. Cook an additional minute. Add beans, oregano and ½ cup water (more if you want more liquid for rice; about that or less for future quesadilla filling or nacho topping). Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook 15-20 minutes.
We eat a lot of rice and beans around here and you should too. At less than a dollar a can (one day I will soak my own, but for the moment, the canned will do fine) and just minutes in the making, they solve many an issue in this household. And with all the protein and roughage they pack, well, they give a lot of nutritional bang for the buck.
Having said that, I don’t actually do classic Puerto Rican rice and beans often. It’s a lot about ingredients and disappointment. Nothing ever tastes as good as you remember it. No one (except certain Dominican kitchen geniuses) can do it quite the way Abuelita (or Titi) used to. And some ingredients don’t grow here or travel well. So, recognizing that my expectations far outway any realistic possiblities of fulfillling them, I opt out. And daydream.
arroz con habichuelas
But…if you can’t be with the ingredients you love, honey, love the ones you’re with.
Love the ones you’re with.
calabaza and sawtooth coriander
So in celebration of Valentine’s Day, I will stop the silly nostalgia for meals never again to be equaled, the yearning for ingredients elusive, the disdain for what is offered right in front of me. I will share a recipe for Puerto Rican rice and beans that embraces, not fantasy, but reality. It is not what could be, but what actually is. It may not be exactly what I dream of, but it provides exactly what I need, and my heart swells in gratitude.
And that, my dear readers, is true romance, true love, true bliss.
Authentic arroz con habichuelas
Born on the Moon Beans
Puerto Rican independentista and poet Juan Corretjer once penned “Yo sería borincano si naciera en la luna” or loosely translated: “I would be Puerto Rican even if I had been born on the moon.”
It is the heartsong of millions on the island and in the diaspora, including me, as it happens! So….Beans Born on the Moon, seems an appropriate name for this dish. It is ingredient-heavy, but easy to assemble once everything is chopped.
Ingredients
(sofrito is the roux, the mirepoix, the basic saute seasoning of Puerto Rican cooking and is very difficult to reconstruct in the mainland U.S., which is why Goya makes a fortune selling it in jars. So if you can get most of the ingredients for sofrito at the local bodega/supermarket, then do this! –actually, quadruple or quintuple it and freeze it in ice cube trays for use later. Otherwise, buy commercial sofrito and use a couple of heaping tablespoons)
½ onion, minced (about ¾ Cup)
1 cubanelle (long green Italian cooking) pepper, seeded and diced
Five or six ajíes (non-spicy green peppers that look exactly like scotch bonnets/habaneros, but are not at all spicy! Taste them! They are hard to find), seeded and diced. Use another cubanelle – the redder the better — if you can’t get these.
Five or six hojas de recao – culantro leaves- chopped. Not to be confused with cilantro, these look like dandelion leaves without the curvy sides. They are hard to get, usually come from Costa Rica and their potency disappears quickly after cutting. I actually grow my own in the summer, which takes forever and yields very little in my part of the world. If you find them, use them as soon as you get them home! If you can’t find them, buy the sofrito WITH culantro
3 Tbs tomato paste or pureed tomatoes (optional)
1 Tbs dried oregano (2 Tbs fresh)
2 Tbs chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
While you are boiling the calabaza, heat the pork in a heavy pot. Cook it through and remove the scored rind. Leave the diced meat. Add a bit of olive oil, if necessary, then sauté the sofrito ingredients until tender, adding optional tomato at the end. Add beans. Add cooked calabaza and the reserved liquid. Cook for 15 minutes and serve on white rice.
Great food - Simply
Click on the image to purchase at the iTunes store!
Click on the image to purchase the Kindle Edition!
It was another summer Friday in the neighborhood and that called for another festive cocktail. Riding high on the success of last session’s passionfruit mojitos, I decided to make mango mojitos. The drink itself followed much the same construction, but the mango was decidedly sweeter than the passionfruit, so I decided that it needed a […]
Summer evenings in the neighborhood can be wonderful. Occasionally on a Friday some of us neighbors bring out folding chairs and sit together in one front yard for a bit of happy hour while the kids go mental on someone else’s lawn. It’s pretty much BYO, but we do mix up a pitcher of experimental […]
We spent the better part of last summer in Puerto Rico, and among the tasty things that my little guy fell in love with was tembleque, a jiggly (temblar means to tremble) dessert that falls somewhere between pudding and flan. I promised him we’d make it back in New York, and this weekend, for a […]
When the heat gets tropical, so should the drinks. On a recent trip to the mountains of Puerto Rico, I was inspired by a wonderfully cooling and exotic sangría I had up around and about El Yumque (Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest Service system) at Noelia’s, recommended to us […]
There are a number of land crab species skittering about Caribbean coastlines. Some are edible and the one we eat most here in Puerto Rico (although I am told they mostly are imported from Venezuela these days) is Cardisoma guanhumi which we call juey and — if you are English-speaking — you might call the […]
Hot, Cheap & Easy 