So, I noticed we have had a famine when it comes to cooking posts. What a shame. Cooking is a great way to take control of your own food and have a lot of fun. Kyle, I hope we get some more Cooking Corner posts in the future, but in the meantime I’ve decided to do a series of Adventures.

Cooking Adventures will be me cooking a meal with only general guidance online. No specific recipes will be followed. It will really be an adventure. Some meals will be good, some will not.

Today, I’ll be showing you my attempt at Spicy Beans and Rice. Rice and beans is a classic dish made in tons of cultures. I’ll try to whip together my own version. I did not go shopping in preparation for this dish. I simply went into my pantry and grabbed what I could find. Join me after the jump to see how it all went down.

The first thing I did was grab all of my ingredients I planned to use. The recipe was forming in my mind rather quickly. It was mostly inspired by a few random elements I saw in the pantry while I was trying to figure out what to do for dinner.

As you can see I used rice. Use anything here. Probably brown rice would be best, but I had white sushi rice which is what I usually have. There’s garlic there, olive oil, salt and pepper (have them on hand ALWAYS), diced tomatoes, black beans, capellini beans, bacon, and red wine vinegar. You can use a different kind of vinegar but red wine vinegar is a good general-purpose one.

In addition to those base ingredients there are some spices I used.

You can see what I used there. I have to say I think that the red pepper flakes ended up overpowering the rest of the taste a little bit. I would either pull it back or leave it out entirely next time. I love the flavor of cumin, so it was going in.

The first thing to do is dice up your garlic. I used 3 big cloves for this dish. That makes it delicious but honestly I probably could have put even more in. I think this is exactly the sort of dish that could benefit from some sauteed onions, but since I don’t like onions I would just put more garlic in.

After dicing the garlic I chopped the bacon crosswise. The bacon pieces after cooking will end up being about the size of one bean. The bacon is going to fill double-duty for us with this dish. It will of course end up in the final dish, but we are going to render out the fat from the bacon by cooking it ahead of time and actually using the bacon fat itself to cook the beans. Unhealth? You bet your ass. I used 6 strips of bacon and their fat in this dish and it yielded me two meals. Yeah that’s only 3 strips of bacon per meal, but I also consumed all of the fat that rendered out as well. If you were to use olive oil instead of bacon fat you would be just fine.

Put a little bit of olive oil in a pan and put it on medium heat. Toss in your garlic and let it sautee for a few minutes and then drop in the bacon.

While the fat is rendering out of the bacon, strain the beans of their liquid. You could use the liquid from the bean cans, but the liquid of the tomatoes will be more flavorful and that with the bacon fat and left over olive oil is enough liquid.

After the bacon fat rendered out it looked like this in the pan.

At this point I poured in the beans, the tomatoes, and the the spices. This is a good time for seasoning (salt and pepper). When seasoning remember that the bacon contains a lot of salt.

At this point you can literally just let the dish cook in the pan. You need to let the liquid in the pan reduce quite a bit. The beans are going to be cooking at this point as well and soaking up all the good flavors we put in.

After sufficient reduction it is time for plating. A bed of rice and scoops of the beans is enough for me. No need for fancy plating here.

The result? Success. In the end this dish was a success. It was very flavorful, even though I definitely think there was too much of the red pepper flakes. Less of the red pepper flakes and little bit more salt would have made the dish perfect. I think it would be very good without the bacon as well, but the bacon really added a good amount of flavor. I definitely recommend trying this or any of your own versions of a rice and beans dish.

Tags: cooking, Rice and Beans, Spicy beans, Tastiness

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.