Red beans and rice

First up: red beans and rice, because I always like cooking food that reminds me of fabulous vacations, and because we wouldn't need to buy too many things that we wouldn't buy normally.

Our notes, in no order:

• The recipe called for kidney, pinto, or small red beans; we used small red beans (Michigan-grown, which had been the deciding factor at the store) which were all right, but the dish didn't seem as satiating as it should have been.  Should try pinto beans next time as they seem to be better about this.
• For a dinner, soak the beans in the morning rather than overnight; based on what we'd done, it seemed that the beans could only soak up so much liquid, and thus the final product was more on the liquid-y side than what I recall from Mother's Restaurant in New Orleans (my current standard, which, I suppose, is not directly transferable to a home kitchen in Michigan).  This particular recipe takes 2-3 hours on the stove, but only for about half that time are the beans in the pot; even getting up late on a weekend still gives plenty of time for the beans to soak before cooking.  OR, maybe we left the pot lid on for too long during the cooking time, preventing excess water from boiling off.  Either way, don't soak beans for 16 hours.
• We did not use the half teaspoon of ground red pepper as called for in the recipe, which was fine for both of us!
• This particular recipe did not call for mashing some of the beans at the end of the cooking process; this might have helped the texture a bit.

The finished dish had some good flavor, and we liked that there was no added salt--and it didn't need any.  A good recipe for beginners like us, though we may try a different one next time we do red beans and rice.

Red beans and rice on...Sunday.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 256
Writeup background music: Mario Kart Wii soundtrack

New culinary adventures.

Hi, it's me again, the pseudo-librarian formerly staying in that nebulous region known to Michiganders as "Up North" for eight weeks of the summer.  Because I have this blog URL and because Dom and I are trying out new recipes thanks to a wedding gift of The Joy of Cooking (2006 edition), I'll be using this to archive recipes and reviews for things we try that are not our usual pastas or stir-fries.  Feel free to read or not, but the narrative probably won't be too exciting!