Frijoles Negros (or, Black Bean and Randomness Soup)

Wow, no recipes posted in a while! But I'm now back out on my own at my summer internship, so I'm having to feed myself again. Here is one of my new favorites.


For me, black beans are in a special food group of familiarity, along with garlic, hummus, dark chocolate, tostones, and cafe con leche. Having been raised in a Cuban family, these beans were practically my first solid food. There's nothing quite like a plate of homemade black beans on white rice (with tostones and boliche, of course). They are flavorful, filling, cheap, and very healthy (they contain plenty of fiber, protein, folate, a lot of antioxidants, and help stabilize blood sugar).

I have recently developed and perfected a new meal idea: canned black beans dumped into a tupperware, with a few slices of mozzarella, a spoonful of minced garlic, dried chopped onions, a dash of cayenne pepper, and a handful of chips or torn up corn tortillas. Nuke for a few minutes, enjoy. Or, if there's a bit of time, stick in the slow cooker on high for 2-3 hours.

Total win! SO easy to prepare, SO delicious, and very inexpensive. The beans were under a dollar a can at Wal-Mart, the tortillas come from a gigantic stack that cost a few dollars, and the other ingredients are always around anyway. Of course, I can only make these every few days. It's such a great "cop-out" meal when I'm tired and just want to get enough protein to not start breaking down emotionally (it happens).

When I have a bit more time, I go a bit further and add the following to Gretel:

• 2 cans black beans
  
• 1 can corn
  
• 1 spoonful minced garlic (or 1-2 cloves)
  
• 1/2-1 onion
  
• 1/2 green bell pepper
  
• A few dashes of cayenne pepper
  
• A few dashes of black pepper
  
• Any other foods that have been hanging out in the fridge for a while and need to be consumed (examples: okra, avocado, and celery).
  
• Whatever meat is lying around. I've used ground beef I browned in my rice cooker, chopped up steak, and chicken.
  
• Mozzarella cheese, once the soup/chili-thing is done cooking
  
• SALT! Oh my gosh, salt salt salt salt salt. Otherwise it tastes funky.
  

This plus some chips or tortillas = yes.


Source:
WHfoods.com

Sweet Potato Soup

Mmm…sweet potatoes. Filling, and a welcome break from the regular red potatoes I seem to be having all the time. I’ve been trying to find some way to eat them other than baking (not a huge fan). And while surfing the interweb, I found a recipe for sweet potato soup. I actually combined ingredients from a whole series of different recipes for this one, and ended up using:

• 2 sweet potatoes
  
• about 1 tsp minced garlic
  
• 1 diced carrot
  
• about 8 oz chicken broth
  
• 3/4 cup plain rice milk
  
• about 2 Tbs ghee
  
• Cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg
  
• Salt
  
• Agave
  

First, I peeled and diced the sweet potatoes (with one break halfway through—wow, they are hard to cut), then added garlic, chicken broth, milk, salt, and spices. Immediately, I noticed how weird the whole mixture smelled. I’m going to blame either the garlic or the combination of broth and rice milk.

I put the lid on, set Gretel on high for about 15 minutes to get the temperature up, then set her to low and went to bed. The next morning, the sweet potatoes and carrot were mushy and the whole thing smelled very spicy. A good fragrance, but still weird. I mushed the soup with a fork and spoon. I tried it; the taste was…debatable. I had a minor freakout—two sweet potatoes is a lot to waste if you don’t get to go food shopping very often!—and did my best to come up with a way to rescue this soup-thing before it got too mushy.

Hoping for the best, I added some ghee and agave, as well as more spices, waited for it to cool down, then spooned it into two tupperwares.

I just finished eating this sweet potato soup for lunch. Verdict? A win!

It’s smooth, but still has texture. The spices I keep finding myself using work really well with it, and it’s filling. Next time, I won’t use garlic or rice milk (maybe almond milk instead). I don’t know why I used carrots. It might just have been because they, like sweet potatoes, are orange.

Anyway, I’ll tuck this away for the next time I feel crumby and just want something easy and mild.

Applesauce

Since I had a few apples lying around, a brand new bottle of ground clove, and a neat recipe, I decided to try applesauce as my next foray into slow-cookery.

I found this recipe on About.com:

• 3 apples, peeled and minced
  
• Water
  
• Cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg
  
• Sugar
  

If you take the time to actually go to the page and check out the recipe, you'll see that I modified it slightly. Namely, I decided to use way less apples (I don't need 10-12 apples' worth of applesauce), added clove and nutmeg, and made no attempt to gauge the amounts of the other ingredients.

All I did was prepare the apples, pour them in, add the spices and sugar, pour in water (way too much, as I discovered later on), and set Gretel to “Low.” I finished this all at about 10:00 PM and turned Gretel off at about 8:00 AM.

It was pretty good. Sweet (the sugar probably wasn't necessary; I'm not sure why I included it in the first place), spicy, and cozy. Also, it made the room smell comfy and spicy, which was great. (The picture doesn't really capture the essence, as I'm sure you've deduced--the only camera I have is the webcam on my mac.)

I don't know that I'll make it again—I enjoyed it, but not enough to justify peeling three apples (easier said than done) and not being able to use Gretel for 8-10 hours. I might try this with another fruit, though; nothing comes to mind immediately, but I really like the idea of slow-cooking fruit for hours and hours with a bunch of spices.

Slow Cooker Experiment #1: Chicken Soup

As a future scientist and overall lazy, hungry student, my instinct is to have fun playing around with things I know very little about. Here's my first experiment with Gretel (I name my appliances). (FYI, the picture below is of a slow cooker SIMILAR to Gretel; I couldn't find the same one online and I don't have a good camera around.)

At the urging of my mother and a fellow digestively-challenged friend, I got a slow cooker last Monday. So Wednesday afternoon, when I found myself bored and hungry, I decided to continue putting off homework and put my new gadget to use to make chicken soup.

Eschewing any official recipes (I mean, it's chicken soup...simple, right?), I chopped up 2 celery stalks, 4 carrots, two red potatoes, and about 1/3 of an onion. I stuck these ingredients, as well as some minced garlic, a package of cooked chicken, an undefined amount of rice, salt, and extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), poured in three 8-oz boxes of organic chicken broth, and set Gretel to "High."

After about 2.5 hours, I peeked in. I probably shouldn't have put in the rice so early, since it had disintegrated into tiny flakes. "It's all right," I said to myself. "It's not like I can thicken it with flour anyway--this is actually serendipitous!" I added some spinach for good measure (and because I've had it in my fridge for over a week) and waited.

Two hours later, the vegetables didn't look like they were going to be softening all the way anytime soon. So I turned off Gretel and called it a night.

Thursday morning, I decided that I didn't have time to wait around and see if the carrots and potatoes were going to soften, so I poured about two cups of the now-gunky mixture into my rice cooker, added some water so that it wouldn't congeal, cooked it for about twenty minutes, then poured it into a disposable tupperware (releasing all sorts of toxins, of course) for lunch. I had this and apple sauce for lunch before my five-hour lab.

It was really good. The rice had completely mixed with the broth by now, giving the "soup" a creamy, soothing consistency. Later in the day, I added an egg to the soup while it was simmering in my rice cooker, both to add protein and to get rid of the eggs that might already be going bad in my fridge.

Anyway, I ended up eating this sludge up until Saturday morning, which was probably unhealthy since 1. repeating food for three days is not good 2. I didn't refrigerate it. But whatever, it's healthier than what I usually end up eating.

Lessons learned:

• Add rice closer to the end unless the intent is to make something that is viscous enough to act as mortar.
  
• Don't make enough "soup" to feed the cast of Lost.
  
• Experimenting with food is fun, messy, and delicious (but I already knew this).
  

Conclusion: Gretel is pretty awesome, and I intend to use her pretty often, though I might think about following a real recipe next time.

Snaps for experimentation!