Not too excited by my vegan plan to make spicy black bean soup last night, Tom headed to the store and bought ingredients to make his special: pasta surprise. And so we got to cook together, one of those simple delights that makes you give thanks for Wednesdays.
Spicy Black Bean Soup
2 T olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
1/2 bell bepper, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 t ground cumin
1 t dried oregano
1.5 cups black beans, soaked and drained
6 cups water
1.5 t salt
14.5 can diced tomatoes
2 chipotle chilis in adobo sauce
2 T sherry
Heat the oil in a saucepan, add the onions, celery and green pepper. Cook until vegetables are softened. Add the garlic, cumin and oregano, and cook for a few minutes. Add the beans and water and cover and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, partly covered until beans are tender. Now, the recipe states that this will take 1-1.25 hours. After this amount of time my beans were still pretty firm. In fact, after four hours they still weren't nice and soft. So I mixed in all the remaining ingredients, transferred it to a slow cooker, and left it on low all the next day. When I got home I mixed it all up with my immersion blender and it was yum yum yum!
This is an interesting soup (in a good way). I had never cooked with chipotles in adobo, and it adds a really nice fire roasted flavor - much different from the black bean soups I've made in the past.
I put it in a bowl, topped it with my pseudo guacamole (avocado, salt and salsa) and a spoonful of plain yogurt.
Tom's meal looked even more delicious. When I asked him for the recipe, he was hestitant and told me, "its a surprise!" But he agreed that I could share the recipe with you all, as long as I mention that it always changes each time. And here is his recipe, exactly as he told it to me.
Tom's Pasta Surprise
16 oz some kind of noodles
2 jars alfredo sauce
1 lb chicken, cut up
1/2 bag crinkle cut carrots
couple heads of broccoli, broken apart into edible portions
sun dried tomatoes (quantity to your liking)
1 can marinated quartered artichoke hearts
1 clove garlic
Cook chicken halfway, then add the vegetables and steam (covered). Cook noodles. Put noodles in a big tub and put the chicken/vegetables on top and then put the sauce on top and then mix it up into surprise bliss.
Doesn't that just look delish? It really is good, and can definitely be altered to your liking.
Side by side we cooked our meals, battled for the best pots and the prime stove burners. We created two completely different meals, each one suited to our own liking. Just goes to show that a mostly carnivore and a mostly vegan really can survive harmoniously in the kitchen.
Do you and your significant other cook together? Bake together? Order pizza and watch a movie together? I'm always intrigued by the food customs and eating habits of other people, so do share with the rest of us......
For this Wednesday's Travel Break, we go to a place I have never been, but that I like the idea of very much. Last week I read a story on NPR about a restaurant in Pittsburgh (the Conflict Kitchen) that only serves recipes from countries that the US is in conflict with. Read all about that here. I absolutely adore this idea for several reasons. First, though Italian and Mexican food is lovely, I know that there are other countries out there that have good food as well. And being the foodie that I am, of course I want to experience those flavors. Second, we tend to focus only on the negative aspects of other countries (such as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea), even though learning about their cultures, traditions and delicious recipes(!!) would probably add a bit of delight to all of our lives. Point being: judge people from other countries based on their government just as much as you'd want people from other countries to judge you on your government (past or present). That's a bit of a poorly crafted sentence, but I sense through the computer that you catch my drift.
