News from the Kitchen

After last week's bitter cooking disappointment, this week was much, much better!!

I cooked pinto beans on Tuesday, and instead of preparing the traditional Brazilian meal of rice (generally long grain white rice, but I usually prepare brown, or basmati rice) and beans (not together, cooked separately, and then mixed in each person's plate), I decided to go for a Mexican style meal instead. Some of our American friends call it "Haystack" and many of our friends in Brazil like to eat it too, particularly at pot luck meals because it's quite simple to put together. We pile on our plates: tortilla chips, cheese (not for me, though), pinto beans (warm enough to melt the cheese), chopped lettuce, homemade salsa, and sour cream. Yummy. The boys ate everything in their plates. My husband joked that they like it because it's "Latin" food ;)

We had that on Tuesday and Wednesday -- this is a common practice at our home, preparing a meal that lasts more than a day, or gets transformed into something else the next day. Take lentils, for example (I looove lentils). I cook them to eat with rice one day and then, the next day, I prepare this dish that my mom calls a "pilaf" but which I'm sure must have another name, since at least here in the U.S. all the pilafs I've seen involve rice and other things. Anyway, it's simply lentils with bulgur wheat soaked in water and cooked together -- it's pretty mushy. I season it with sautéed onions and we eat it with sour cream, or yogurt. My oldest son adores it.

The rest of the beans remained in the fridge and on Thursday night I put it in the blender with water to make the base of a common Brazilian soup: Bean soup. I sautéed onions and garlic, added the puréed beans, chopped potatoes and after the potatoes were almost cooked, whole wheat angel hair pasta, broken into small pieces.

On Wednesday night I prepared a lot of bow-tie pasta with tomatoes and frozen artichokes from Trader Joe's for Thursday's lunch (I'm happy that I've been able to cook pasta only once a week -- the boys would eat it every day, I know). The main meal in our household is lunch, not dinner, but I let the boys eat some pasta for dinner then and I ate it too. Today I just sautéed some tofu and cooked some brown rice with carrots and edamame (green soy beans -- which my oldest son picked out of his rice -- the week couldn't be perfect!).

All right, I do have a photo for you, but not of the food I described above. And I'll put it in a separate post, all right?