A little bit India, a little bit Costa Rica
Sunday’s I usually cook up a batch of something I can portion up into a bunch of lunches for the week. This week I made another attempt at one of my favorite Indian foods – saag. A while back I found an excellent recipe that I’ve been using as a base to improvise over.
This time around I substituted mustard greens for the spring greens (I have *no* idea where to find the spring greens the recipe calls for, it appears that they are some sort of young cabbage), then added 2 carrots cut into big pieces right after I zapped the mixture with my nifty immersion blender. Before I cooked up the onions I pan fried up two cubed russet potatoes, then mixed the onions in and rejoined the recipe. I like things a bit on the hot side so I added 3 tsp cayenne to the spice mixture. Finally, when mixing the spiced onions and potatoes back into the main pot I also added a can of garbanzo beans.
Results? Pretty damn good with the jasmine rice I cooked up, although as usual way too much food and a bit hotter than I planned.
I had a bit of leftover rice sitting in my refrigerator that I thought I’d cook up into something I could quickly heat up for breakfasts as well. I usually do a stir-fried rice with whatever I have left around when I have old white rice but this time I though I do something different. Many years ago I went to Costa Rica for a week and while I was there I was exposed this addicting black bean & rice dish that they eat for breakfast over there. I found a recipe online and proceeded to cook up a batch that I zap up for breakfast. Results were ok but not quite like what I remembered, maybe because I had to use chicken stock instead of bean stock.
I’d put some pictures up online but I sans camera for the time being – I destroyed my trusty canon S400 this last summer when I took it on an ocean hike with my brothers and ended up getting sand in it . Now the lens is stuck halfway out and no amount of compressed air will remedy the situation… <big sigh>.