The Goods Are Odd

Maybe because I enjoy making the point that you can eat a seemingly endless variety of delicious healthy meals at low cost I haven’t addressed the quintessential tight budget meal of rice and beans. Also because it seems time is one of the biggest barriers to eating well, tight budget or no, and making rice and beans from scratch is a pretty long endeavor. Also, though a perfectly delicious and simple meal I actually have some difficulty with cooking both beans and brown rice in a reliably successful way.

So to be honest I guess I like the idea and product of the bowl of flavorful and healthy rice and beans much more than the process. But a recent post on the Culinate Blog about various foodies’ favorite rice and beans combos made me feel that maybe avoiding this primary dish could be a glaring omission on my Eat Healthy on the Cheap repertoire. So I was inspired to make my favorite rice and beans dinner, not just to have for a dirt cheap dinner and hearty leftovers but to overcome my general aversion and get the process under my belt to make it easier in the future. (When I think about the ease with which my parents threw together healthy vegetarian meals after full days of stressful work I think about how many dinners they had made by the time I was 18- thousands! So I try not to get too discouraged when my fourth or fifth attempt at something is still slow and awkward)

The post on Culinate was clever and helpful, especially the reference to this post about cooking beans generally which I only just read, but I wasn’t directly inspired by the famous foodies’ particular choices. So I decided to make a classic straightforward black beans and red rice pilaf.

(As a side note, I am generally pleased with this Culinate blog, based mostly on writing from my hometown of Portland OR, it provides the type of recipes I feel never come across through a general google search which are usually simple meals based on whole foods with intelligent discussion. So this is my plug for others to check it out.)

The recipe for the red rice pilaf was from Alice Waters’ Art of Simple Food. The tomatoes of course making it red, it is just made with brown rice. But this is an important variation because the cooking time is significantly longer than she has as is the amount of stock. (Of course water is totally good to use to, I just felt like making something a little richer)

I made black beans from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen a great resource for a huge variety of traditional Mexican dishes- and a bit overwhelming both in the quantity and variety and the assumption of ingredients on hand and additional cooking ware. I am working on keeping more dried chiles on hand since they are of nominal cost, keep well, and add exceptional flavor. And I often have dried masa, but many times i look over dishes that sound delicious but I just don’t have a lot of the ingredients and he doesn’t really give alternatives. But the Classic Mexcian Pot Beans are much less particular than his other dishes. I used pre-soaked the beans and cooked them with browned onions in olive oil with a dried chipotle chile, which added the perfect kick, salting them after they were done and letting them sit for a bit.

The whole operation was a couple of hours really from start to finish. But it was largely hands off other than stirring the beans and adding water when needed. I made sure to cook them longer than I really wanted to because I am often impatient and don’t give them enough time. The rice was rich and creamy and the beans were spicy and delectable. A long process but certainly worth it. The change I would make for next time would be to make more of each so the long wait is worth more. Doubling the amount wouldn’t double the cooking time (I don’t think…) and then I would only go through the effort once for more meals. The nominal cost definitely provides incentive for the time commitment.