Brasilian Black Bean Recipe

[nibot]

Back in Berkeley my roommates and I subsisted for a time on a dinners of black beans, rice, and grape juice. It doesn't sound like much, but it's actually very good, and cheap too ($0.70/person). When I first got to Sweden I attempted to have a big black beans dinner for some of the Americans, only to discover that canned black beans can't be found in this country. I didn't believe it at first, but it's true. Fortunately, there's an international food store called Ris & Curry that sells sacks of dry black beans. Finally this weekend I decided to try preparing some black beans from scratch, and they turned out very well. Korridormates gave the beans bewildered looks, and the Spanish Guy asked, ``What is that, petroleum?'' But Fatima asked me for the recipe, so they can't be too bad.

Ingredients

• 2 dl black beans (svarta böner), dried
• ½ red bell pepper (röd paprika), chopped
• ½ green bell pepper (grön paprika), chopped
• 1 onion (lök), chopped
• 1 clove garlic (vitlöksklyfta), pressed
• vegetable oil (olja)
• salt
• water

Makes slightly less than half a liter; one large serving or two small servings. Oh, for the metrically challenged (Kaolin), two deciliters is 85% of a cup, and a liter is about a quart. (I guess it is kind of abnormal to use 500mL beakers as drinking glasses)

Procedure

1. Soak the black beans overnight in plenty of water.
2. Boil the bean mixture, then let it simmer. Add water if necessary.
3. Sauté the chopped onion and garlic in vegetable oil, then dump it all into the simmering bean mixture.
4. Add the chopped bell peppers to the simmering bean mixture.
5. Add salt until it tastes good.
6. Simmer the bean/vegetable/water mixture for about 1½ hours, or until the beans are sufficiently tender.
7. Serve with rice. (In the probable case that there's still excess liquid, serve with a slotted spoon or even use a pasta strainer)

Yummy!

Comments

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

can you convert deciliters to cups for us ignoramusii? ;)

eh, looks like one cup to me.

sounds like soup.

My own recipe would have: "add butter to taste" as well. It's amazing what animal fat can do for a food. ;)

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Do you

1. Have a direct extra-sensory link to the livejournal servers?
2. Spastically check for updates every thirty seconds?
3. Receive some kind of notification when I add something in my journal?

You always comment before my entries are even finished. Not that I'm complaining, I'm just wondering how you do it. (-:

Oh I added conversions to "traditional" measure just for you. And, it's not a soup. It's beans! But you could keep the extra water in and serve it as a soup if you want, it's pretty good, and nutritionally balanced to boot.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

1) working on it
2) sometimes, but not with any sort of regularity like that. I go for days (sometimes weeks) without checking... but when I check, I often sit on the friends page and hit reload whenever I'm not doing anything else or trying to think through a problem or whatever...
3) no, though I think there is an option for that somehow in a twisted sort of manner. I do receive email notification when a post or comment I made is replied to, though. I think I was just lucky to notice the "traditional" measurement you added. the page layout was subtly different when I hit reload... and then I saw my name... :)

what I'm ostensibly doing right now is cleaning my room while trying to merge physical todo lists and refraining from doing any other actual work.

Hell yes..

[(Anonymous)]

Black beans and rice are one of my staples.

I usually cook beef sausage with the beans,
throw in red pepper, garlic, onion, paprika,
and some cayenne pepper because I like it hot!
I never have as much luck with dried beans,
and at $.89 per can in the States, i'd rather
splurge with nice soft ones....cooks up lots
faster too.

I had lots of fun training my Japanese gf to
enjoy this ;)

[nanomonkey.livejournal.com]

Whenever I have money I stock up my pantry with dried beans, rice, whole wheat flour and cans of stewed tomatoes. It has saved my ass (and the asses of roomates for that matter) many a time. You can live for weeks off of these three things if you add in the occassional dozen eggs and oil/butter.

If you have a crock pot just soak the black beans over night then rinse them in the morning and cook them while your at work with one medium chopped onion, garlic, red pepper flakes, bay leaves and a dash of oil. The only real consideration is making sure you put enough water so that the beans remained covered. If you run out of water it will stink up your house something special.

I also like to mix stewed tomatoes, onions, garlic, bay leaves, oregano and cumin with a variety of dried beans (black, pinto, red and white) to make a hearty chile (sin carne). Once again the crock pot makes it impossible to screw up. I just make sure I put it on low if I'm leaving for more than 3 hours. Left over beans make a good filling for enchiladas later on that week.

I've always wanted to try making a solar oven so that I could do this while camping or to make it even more fool proof/inexpensive. Time to go try my hand at a parobolic mirror.

[nanomonkey.livejournal.com]

Okay, I added the whole wheat flower later as I was thinking about my pasta machine and baking bread/pizza/foccacchia. So really there are four things. Sorry about the gramatical error.