Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for January, 2009
January 29, 2009 at 6:01 pm · Filed under breads, food, soup/stew
This was originally a recipe for Guinness potato bread, but as with anything that calls for Guinness, I substituted Murphy’s, which is a stout from Cork that we like better. Not that this will stop us from going to the Guinness brewery tour when we’re in Ireland in April, but we’re really only going to be in Dublin anyway. Although I can’t find any information on the Murphy’s website about having brewery tours even if we were going to be in Cork.
Not that you care about our travel plans, so moving forward!
This bread is hearty with the potatoes, toasts beautifully, and with its soft texture, is also very good plain. Not that a bit of butter would go amiss on it. It doesn’t really taste beery (or stouty, I suppose) at all, though. It appears the main function of the stout, other than as a medium in which to dissolve the yeast, is to open up a can and use part of it, so you’re left with most of a can that needs to be consumed. It’s an excuse, is what I’m saying.
I halved the original recipe since I only needed one loaf, and since she didn’t give a temperature or duration of baking, I went with what someone in her comments had said. And now I am passing the savings on to you!
Murphy’s Potato Bread
Ingredients
2 1/3 (but a generous 1/3) cups flour
2 smallish russet potatoes, cooked and mashed
1/4 cup lukewarm Murphy’s or stout of your choice
a heaping 1/2 tsp yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil
Method
Dissolve yeast in stout.
Stir together with potatoes, oil, and salt.
Mix in the flour, in roughly half-cup increments.
Once the flour is incorporated, knead until smooth.
Cover with a cloth and leave it to rise for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, roll it out and form a loaf. You can go with a round loaf here, if you like, or you can shape it to fit in a loaf pan, like I did.
Cover it again and let rise for 20 minutes.
Once you’ve covered it, put the oven on to preheat to 375.
After the 20 minutes are up, put your loaf into a loaf pan or on some kind of baking sheet and bung it into the oven for 35 – 40 minutes, or until golden brown and not squashy.
January 28, 2009 at 12:11 am · Filed under food, meals, pasta
The caption under the picture I clicked on Tastespotting said “This recipe will make you happy.” And it did, but also it didn’t. It made me happy, because mushrooms sauteed in bacon grease can’t fail to make someone happy if they like mushrooms, but Matt’s dislike of mushrooms has apparently extended past the objects themselves and extended to any dish that includes them – a position previously only held with regard to green peppers, which flavour the entire dish, but mushrooms, until now, did not. Now they do, so he hated it, which means it wasn’t a success. So that didn’t make me happy. It takes a lot to make bacon unpalatable to him.
I, on the other hand, thought it was amazing. The overarching flavour, in my opinion, was bacon, not mushroom, and the sauce was delicate and creamy. I could eat this all day long. If I ever decide to make it again, I’ll take the mushrooms out once they’re done cooking and only add them back into my portion. I don’t know if that will keep their flavour out, but it’s that or nothing.
But this also means that I have to reevaluate some recipes. See, when I email them to myself, I categorize them by what kind of meal they are, unless they contain something Matt won’t eat, in which case they go into the “only me” file (well, unless they also contain something he loves, in which case I can’t make it at all because is that fair? And now this dish falls into that category). After talking with him about it, I hadn’t been putting recipes featuring mushrooms into the “only me” file, because he said they didn’t ruin the whole dish and that he could just pick them out (and give them to me). But now I know that that’s not the case, so I have to go back through and pull out all the mushroom-including recipes.
I’m tired of this part now. Let’s just do the recipe and then I can go to bed. It’s from the Foodista Blog. She used chanterelle mushrooms, I used regular supermarket button mushrooms (pre-sliced for your convenience, even). She had parsley to mix in, I did not. She made enough for 4 people, I made enough for 2. Now you know.
Bacon-Mushroom Pasta
Ingredients
pasta
2 strips bacon
1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced (note: this is me further halving the amount of mushrooms so there’s only enough for one person. If you are making it for two people who both eat them, double this)
1/4 cup white wine
1 tbsp cream
parmesan
Method
Cook the pasta according to package directions.
While that’s going on, cook the bacon. Ideally, the pasta will be done at just about the time that the sauce is done; it’s a pretty quick sauce and the longest part thereof is cooking the bacon.
When the bacon is done, take it out and drain it on a paper towel, but leave the grease in the pan.
Saute the mushrooms in the bacon grease until they’re soft.
Break up the bacon into bite-sized pieces, then add it back into the pan, along with the wine, and simmer until, as the original recipe says, the alcohol has cooked off. I had no idea when this was, so I gave it a couple of minutes and then decided it was time to move on to the next step. Worked for me!
Stir in the cream until the sauce, as they say, comes together. So not a bunch of globules of cream floating in wine. You know. I also added a pinch or two of parmesan at this point, so you want to stir until that’s incorporated as well.
The pasta should be ready now, so drain it, if you haven’t already, and then toss it with the sauce.
The original recipe had you seasoning it to taste with salt, but bacon and parmesan are both salty, so you might not need any.
January 25, 2009 at 9:47 pm · Filed under dessert, food
Tastes rhyme-a-licious!
I made these yesterday because I never seem to bake for us to just enjoy at home. I bake things to take to parties, to family holidays, to work… but never just for us. So I made us these brownies. The recipe is from The Life and Loves of Grumpy’s Honeybunch, and she got it from Cooking Light, so obviously that means I can shovel them into my mouth with both hands and not gain two pounds in one day, which means that the scale at the gym is lying, because it’s jealous. Obviously. However, the rhyming cutesiness is all mine, so all hate can be directed my way.
Toffee Coffee Brownies
Ingredients
Cooking spray
2 tbsp instant coffee (I used those instant coffee tubes, you know, each tube makes one mug of coffee or whatever, and it took 3 tubes)
1/4 cup hot water
1/4 cup butter (I may have used a bit less, which I feel I totally got away with)
1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1/4 cup toffee chips
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Coat bottom of baking pan with cooking spray.
Dissolve coffee in hot water, stirring until fully dissolved.
Microwave butter and chocolate chips together for 1 minute or until butter melts, then just stir it until all the chocolate is melted and everything is, to borrow a phrase from Georgia Nicolson, smoothy smooth.
Whisk together flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, and salt in a big bowl.
Whisk together the coffee, chocolate-butter business, vanilla, and eggs in another bowl. If you are intelligent, unlike me, you will have used a fairly big bowl for either the coffee or the melting of the chocolate and won’t have to get another bowl dirty. Whatever.
Now add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix until just combined.
Spread batter in the pan and sprinkle the toffee bits over the top.
Bake for 22 minutes, roughly, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out basically clean. I thought I had set my timer, but it wasn’t running for the first few minutes, so I guessed.
Anyway, cool them in the pan on a wire rack.
The toffee bits have kind of disappeared now, though.
January 20, 2009 at 6:00 pm · Filed under food
How Bond-James-Bond of me.
Anyway.
I had yesterday off, not because it was MLK Day or anything, just because I had a dentist’s appointment (no cavities!), so I made bread. I would have made dinner, but I just did the night before, and I didn’t need to tax Matt’s life with yet another new dish I’d be essentially asking him to like. I also don’t make non-meal things enough at home, so I wanted to start righting that wrong. Maybe I’ll do a make-up dinner sometime later this week, although I doubt it – I’m going to the gym tonight, we’ve got an appointment with a realtor tomorrow night (to make up for the one that the realtor TOTALLY BLEW OFF on Saturday), and we’ve got friends’ shows to go to on Thursday and Friday. So… perhaps not.
But this bread, ok, it’s from Student Kitchens, who, incidentally, use the same layout as me, except with more columns, so the main text one is really narrow. Moving forwards, they adapted a recipe from the famed, but not owned by me, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. And I, in turn, adapted theirs. Matt would not be interested in actual sundried tomatoes in the bread, and I have to admit that I always think I like sundried tomatoes, and then every time I eat them in something, it turns out that their flavour is too intense and I don’t really love them all that much. It’s the same with volleyball. I always think it’s going to be fun, and then I’m playing it and it’s not fun at all. So either volleyball is the sundried tomato of sports, or sundried tomatoes are the volleyball of food. And this bread was not about to be a volleyball (for starters, it’s about half the size of one…). So when I was at the store trying to pick up some more cheese so I didn’t totally wipe out our cheese stock on it, I found a tomato and basil cheddar and figured that would be a nice compromise. And it was! It worked out fantastically. This bread is really pretty delicious. And the recipe was for 4 loaves, 3 to freeze and one to make immediately, but my freezer space is limited so I only made the one loaf, which is what these numbers work out to. It’s a pretty small loaf. You could probably double it, or at least one-and-a-half it, if you like that kind of math, and not wind up with some kind of shocking bread monstrosity.
Cheese Bread
Ingredients
2/3 cup warm water (the other recipe says “body temperature,” but my hands are always cold so what do I know)
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp yeast
1 1/2 cups flour, or perhaps a bit more, plus some for dusting the board, your hands, the ball of dough, and the rest of your kitchen
1/4 cup (but be generous) grated cheese – and here I highly recommend this tomato and basil cheddar business
1 oz parmesan – a couple of healthy fingerfuls ought to work, but again, using too much is not going to cause problems
Method
Mix water, salt, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl (I used the same bowl throughout the whole process, so consider that the dough is going to rise in here when deciding how big it needs to be).
Add the flour, being prepared to chuck in a bit more if the dough sticks to the sides of the bowl when pressed against it instead of coming away.
Mix in the cheeses until everything is well blended.
Cover the bowl with a cloth and leave it somewhere reasonably warm for 2 to 5 hours, or until the dough is doubled in size and the surface is almost flat. I left it for about 4 hours, but I could have probably done only 3 hours – it’s pretty toasty in our apartment right now (and before you start thinking we’re profligate with the heat, we don’t control it – it’s included in our rent).
Flour a board and your hands, and also the dough, and knead it for a few minutes. The original recipe says you should feed it back into itself. I like that. So feed your bread to itself.
When you’re done and your dough has eaten its fill of itself, form it into a ball, and place it, seam side down, back in the bowl to rise some more. I covered the bowl again, just to be on the safe side, but it doesn’t say you have to. Anyway, this rise goes for 40 minutes.
At the 20 minute mark, put your oven on to preheat to 450 with the racks in the bottom and the centre.
Put a brownie pan or something on the bottom one; your bread will go on the centre one.
Once the 40 minutes are up, put your bread in the oven and pour a cup of water into the brownie pan, shutting the door right away. Apparently the steam does magical things to the crust.
Bake for 30 minutes, rotating halfway through.
Cool on a rack.
It’s delicious warm and pretty good at room temperature, too. I’m going to have some tonight when I get home from the gym, and I can’t wait.
January 19, 2009 at 11:53 pm · Filed under food, meals
I’ve never really been a fan of meatloaf. Matt thinks this makes no sense, because I like hamburgers, and I like meatballs, and meatloaf is not dissimilar to either of these, except loaf-formed. I don’t like that ketchupy glaze, I guess. Or maybe I just didn’t care for the seasonings in the ones I’d had. So when I read about these pizza mini-meatloaves, I thought this might be something. Of course, I didn’t want to make 8 mini loaves, just the one regular sized one, so I figured quartering the recipe would work out, and it did. She gives a variety of options on what to do with the cheese, whether to mix it in, use it as a topping, or hide a big tube of it in the middle of the meatloaf to be a stretchy, cheesy surprise. I did kind of a combination of mixing it in and topping the meatloaf with it. And you know, it’s ok. I don’t know if I’m sold on meatloaf yet, but it’s ok. Matt liked it. I bet a slice of it would go well as a sandwich with the bread I made today. Anyway, I’m not trying to sell these things short – I’m just not the meatloafiest person, so for me to say they’re all right is basically high praise. I’d have liked to keep the green peppers in, but that was not to be. I put some paprika in instead.
Pizza Meatloaf
Ingredients
~1 lb ground beef
1 small onion, diced
whatever you deem is an appropriate amount of paprika
1/8 cup parmesan (I eyeballed half of my 1/4 cup measuring thingy)
1/2 cup pizza sauce, plus more for topping (of which I used up the rest of a jar in the fridge, but I’m sure you guys would never use Pizza Vite… like I care)
1 1/2 slices of bread, ripped into shreds (I used the heel as my half-slice)
1 egg, because there’s no point in using half an egg
1/4 tsp salt
a few cranks pepper
1 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning (note: is this a creepy copout spice that nobody uses? I have some that came with a spice rack that we have, so I used it, and I don’t know if that’s wrong)
1/2 cup mozzarella, plus more for topping, and let’s just come right out and say it, I used the kind from a bag
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Mix all ingredients (except the “extra for topping” amounts, obviously) together in a bowl, until well blended.
Scoop the mixture into a loaf pan and make it roughly even.
Sling it into the oven for 30 minutes.
Pull it out and top with sauce and cheese.
Put it back in the oven for 10 or 20 minutes, or until cheese is bubbly and starting to go golden and the meat’s internal temperature is within the realm of edibility.
You may want to let it sit a couple minutes first – even if it isn’t quite 160 F inside, it’s still plenty hot enough to burn your mouth, especially if we’re talking about the molten cheese on top.
January 15, 2009 at 4:34 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Do you know what this is? This is me being caught up. Well, except for old recipes I made before starting this thing, but they don’t really count since they’re there as insurance against having nothing to post. I made this on the weekend and I’ll be having leftovers of it when I get home from the gym tonight. It was from a recipe I saved a long time ago, before I even had the idea to do a food blog of my own, and so I hadn’t noted down its provenance. But through my search ninja skills, I found it – it’s nearly a year old, and it comes from Canarygirl. So it’s clearly January-appropriate food, although I’d argue it’s even more fitting up here in frigid New England (guess how cold it is right now? 14 degrees F – that’s -10 C – and it’s the middle of the day right now) than in the balmy Canary Islands. I wound up ditching some of her ingredients, doubling others, guessing on some measurements, and generally treating the whole thing like a guideline rather than a strict rule. Which turned out fine for me, because I got to finish up tons of things that were languishing in my fridge, freezer, or cupboard. Also, I halved it, and I still got tons of leftovers out of it.
Lentil, Chorizo, and Bacon Stew
Ingredients
about a cup of dried lentils – I just used up what I had left and it was a little shy of a cup, but they bulked up and took up more room in the stew once they’d simmered for a while. So going light on them is still fine.
1/2 an onion, diced
1 small yam, peeled and diced
1 rib celery, sliced
1 large or 2 small carrots, or, if you’re me and the grocery store is OUT OF NORMAL CARROTS when you go, take enough baby carrots to approximate the size of a grown-up carrot, and slice them
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1/2 lb chorizo, sliced
4 strips bacon, cooked and chopped into bite-size pieces
let’s say about 3 cups veggie stock, which meant I got to use my homemade stuff that had been in the freezer. This is why I don’t know exactly how much I put in.
1 6-oz can tomato paste
1 bay leaf
salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste – I didn’t need any salt because my stock is pretty salty, and Canarygirl made the good point that boiling garlic is not really helpful in terms of getting the flavour, and it would be an extra step and add some oil to brown some garlic in the bottom of the pot first. Do that if you want. I just went with the garlic shaker.
Method
Put everything in a big pot and bring to a boil.
Cover and reduce heat to a simmer for 2 hours or until lentils are tender, stirring occasionally.
Remove cover and simmer for a bit longer until desired thickness is reached – I left it half an hour because it was already pretty thick, but the original recipe says an hour.
Crank some pepper on top, it’s nice.
The original recipe had beef stock “or water,” and while veggie stock and beef stock are nothing alike, if it’s ok to substitute water, it’s bound to be ok to substitute veg stock, right? It also included zucchini (yuck) and a piece of pumpkin, which I don’t need to buy a whole pumpkin just for one wee piece. On the other hand, if I were halving faithfully, I should have only used half a can of the tomato paste, but “whatever” was my feeling on this one, and besides, I hate wasting parts of cans of tomato paste. I know tubes of it exist. Why can’t my grocery store sell them?
January 14, 2009 at 5:50 pm · Filed under dessert, food
Oh, you guys, I am almost caught up. I made this last week, and then there’s a dinner from the weekend, and then it’s now. Let’s see if I can get them both out of the way before I cook something else. Wow, that came out very “before she strikes again!” which is really more ominous than it should be. I mean, strong men don’t faint when they see me heading into the kitchen.
So! About this cake.
Well, I hadn’t baked for work in quite a while, and after getting a glass cake stand as a work Secret Santa (sorry, Secret Snowflake! Whatever) gift and shooting off my big mouth about how I would bring a cake in on it, I felt like I really had no excuse for not baking something. Of course, the glass cake stand is never going to come in to the office – imagine toting a glass cake stand, complete with cake, on the T, that’s a recipe for failure – but I had to do something. So I baked this nice coffee-cake-ish business – actually, a “muffin cake,” but I don’t know what that is, and how any cake is really different from a muffin other than its shape, and anyway this tastes good so let’s not quibble over the details, OKAY? Just make it and eat it and enjoy. It’s from a Dorie Greenspan recipe, so it is basically guaranteed to be good, at least gauging by the number of devoted acolytes she has around the internet. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have her cookbook. I don’t have time for cookbooks as I’ll never get all the way through my internet recipe collection. Oh well. Onward to cake!
Pear Apple Cake
Ingredients
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup apple cider (Matt didn’t think I’d be able to find it at this time of the year. Hah!)
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla (I ran out halfway through. I’m sure it would have been even more delicious with the full amount, but it was still pretty tasty, so if for some reason you wanted or needed to skimp on the vanilla, it can be done without total catastrophe)
8 tbsp – that’s right, one stick – butter, melted and then allowed to cool down
1 3/4 cups flour (I did 1/2 a cup whole wheat flour, because I have not yet come to terms with the fact that I really can’t buy just the 2 lb bags of flour anymore, and thus ran out of regular flour)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom, or about 3 pods, opened and crumbled in
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup oats
2 pears, peeled and cut into smallish chunks
icing sugar for dusting the top
Method
Preheat the oven to 400.
Butter and flour an 8″ square pan.
Whisk together the milk, cider, egg, vanilla, and melted butter. Marvel at how the butter instantly solidifies upon contact with the cold liquids. Consider that maybe they should have sat out a bit at room temperature first. Oh well.
In a larger bowl, whisk together the flour, both sugars, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and cardamom until thoroughly combined.
Mix in the oats.
Pour the liquid mixture into the dry mixture and mix with a rubber spatula until just combined.
Fold in the pears.
Pour into the pan.
Bake for 35 – 40 minutes or until golden brown and a toothpick in the centre comes out clean.
Sprinkle icing sugar over the top. If you wind up taking it to work the next morning, be aware that most of it will have absorbed into the cake by this point, so maybe only do this if you’ll be serving it right away.
It’s good either warm from the oven or at room temperature.
Interesting fact: the oats dissolve completely! You’d never know they were there.
January 13, 2009 at 5:56 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
This is a recipe from the excellently-named Omnomicon. It is, in essence, pierogies deconstructed and spread through a pan. You’ve got the potato-and-cheese filling, the onions that don’t occur in the batches that Matt’s mom whips up every Christmas but that are, I’m aware, a vital part of many other people’s pierogi experience, and then you’ve got the pasta sheets replacing the dough. I saw it and instantly gained 5 pounds, which is a good gauge of recipes. I halved it, sort of – I think my casserole dish is smaller than what a lot of people appear to be working with, even though I don’t usually need to break lasagna noodles, and I can fit 3 side-by-side in a layer (well, with just a wee bit of overlap), but the amount I made was just right for the dish.
I omitted the sour cream, because Matt would have objected to it, but next time I would consider adding not only more cheese but also some meat. Aleta at the Omnomicon suggests cooking up some kielbasa and serving it alongside the lasagna. I suspect it would be very, very good if you put it within the lasagna itself – slices on top of each potato layer and maybe on top of the whole shebang. I’d grill it up first or fry slices in a pan, so there would be that delicious crispiness around the edges. I know you don’t put kielbasa in an actual pierogi (side note: why not?) but try it here.
Pierogi Lasagna
Ingredients
enough lasagna noodles to do 3 layers in your pan, or more if you can – why not?
2 lbs potatoes
1/4 cup milk
1 cup (or more!) grated cheese – I used cheddar but do what you like
5 tbsp butter (you could probably get away with 4, honestly)
1/2 an onion, sliced in rings
salt
Method
Preheat the oven to 375.
Cut up the potatoes and put them in a pot of cold water.
Bring to a boil and let it rip until they are fork-tender.
In the meantime, you can cook your noodles if you have a wealth of pots and stove elements. Otherwise, you can do that once your potatoes are done, and spend this time instead making onion butter, as follows:
Melt all the butter in a pan.
Put your onion rings in it.
Fry those puppies until they are soft.
Ok! Once your potatoes are ready, drain them and mash them with the milk and salt.
Stir in the cheese.
If all your three parts (noodles, potatoes, and onion butter) are ready, you can start layering.
First, grease the pan with some onion butter.
Then, a layer of noodles.
Next, a layer of potatoes; you’ll probably want to spread them along the noodles instead of trying to do any crosswise fanciness.
Now, some of the onions, and drizzle some of the butter over it.
Keep repeating the steps until your pan is full, ending with some onions on top.
Bake for 20 minutes.
Let rest for 10 minutes before digging in; I gave it maybe 5 because of my smaller pan.
Another reason to add some meat in would be to get a little colour in there. If you don’t leave the skins on the potatoes, and if your cheese is white, you’ve got a white stack of whiteyness.
January 11, 2009 at 12:22 am · Filed under dessert, food
Pierniczki are Polish Christmas cookies, described on some websites as being a variation of gingerbread, but these ones I made, from a recipe on Coffee and Vanilla, were much more honey cookies than anything else. Honey and almonds. Mine don’t look anything near as polished and nice as hers, though, because my dough was so sticky that cookie cutters were an absolute waste of time. I’d try to pick the cut-out piece up and it would stretch and tear and generally make a complete dog’s breakfast of itself. So I just made little round balls and flattened them down by hand. Nobody was bothered, least of all me. And despite being 50% Polish, Matt is unfamiliar with these cookies, so he wasn’t aware of how they should or shouldn’t be, and was just able to enjoy them on their own merits.
I made them for a New Year’s Eve party which involved a great deal of standing around outside in the frigid wind and snow to get there – so I don’t know if this forcible refrigeration had any impact on the cookies. I don’t think it made the texture odd, though, because they were chewy and that’s what all sources seem to say they ought to be. I halved the recipe, though.
Pierniczki
Ingredients
2 to 2 1/2 cups flour (start with the lower amount and add more if necessary)
1/2 cup ground almonds (I threw some whole almonds in my food processor and it worked fine)
7 oz honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp ground cloves (or do the best you can with smashing whole ones up, like I did)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
a bag of chocolate chips to melt for the topping
sliced almonds for the topping
Method
Preheat the oven to 400.
Over low heat, bring the honey, sugar, butter, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg to a boil, then take it off the heat to cool a bit.
Mix the flour, baking soda, ground almonds, and egg.
Add the honey mixture in and mix until it forms a dough that is not too sticky, which… good luck with that. I ran out of flour.
Roll out and use cookie cutters, or if that’s not going to happen for you, just scoop little balls of dough onto a greased cookie sheet and flatten them out.
Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool on a rack.
They’re good just like that, honestly, but if you want to add a topping:
Melt the chocolate – if you’re classy, you can do it on a double boiler, or if you’re me, you can do it in the microwave.
Brush it onto the cooled cookies and decorate them with the almonds.
January 9, 2009 at 2:43 pm · Filed under food, meals
I had the day after Christmas off. Matt did not. I felt I had over-indulged at Christmas dinner and therefore opted not to have lunch, but by dinnertime I was about ready to eat again. Matt had been working all day and had a regular type of hunger. I had found this recipe for beans and rice with chorizo – and adding sausage into something always makes it better, am I wrong? – on The Crepes of Wrath, whose name I’ve always admired, and she, in turn, got it from someone else, and half the people in this hemisphere eat this or a variation on it all the time. Which brings me to another point about the thing – there’s no arguing that it’s “fancy” or “rich people food.” Sometimes I worry that what I make is pretentious, or at least too much so for Matt’s taste. But there’s no arguing with straight-up poor people food.
Beans and Rice with Chorizo
Ingredients
1 tsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 tomato, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp cumin
1/2 lb chorizo, which I sliced but which you can also squeeze out of the casing and break up, whatever you like
1 15-oz can black beans, mostly drained
1 15-oz can pinto beans, mostly drained
a few squirts of hot sauce, according to your preferences
rice, cooked according to package directions
grated cheese for topping
green onion would definitely be nice too, but I didn’t have any, more’s the pity
Method
Heat the oil in a pan over medium heat.
When it’s warmed, add the onion and saute for 5 minutes.
Throw in the tomato and garlic and saute for 5 more minutes. This smells beautiful, by the way.
Dump in the beans, cumin, chorizo, and hot sauce, and cook for another 10 minutes or until the chorizo is cooked.
Give the beans a bit of a bash with something (I used a potato masher), not to make the whole thing into a paste, but just to make it a little bit more of one cohesive mass instead of many individual beans. Whatever. Omit this step if you want. I like a little bit of smashed beans. Your mileage may vary.
Serve it over the rice and garnish it with the cheese and green onions and whatever else you think is nice.
It’s nutritious, tasty, unpretentious, and quick as pants. What is not to love?
P.S.: the tomatoes almost completely disappear. You get flavour but no actual tomatoes in your mouth. How weird is that?
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