Rice with Black Beans and Tomatoes

Posted by Viriatha; pics at the end of the post.

Boil rice per package directions. I make it 6 cups at a time because this will feed me for several days in a row. Mix rice with taco seasoning or similar. Rinse beans, add to rice. Add diced tomatoes. Arrange on bed of lettuce leaves, top with shredded Monterrey jack and sour cream.

Option 1: Add diced tofu. To make tofu more cheese-like, drain and freeze. It ends up being like a mild Swiss in taste and texture.

Option 2: Mix a gumbo mix of veggies in with the rice.

Mmmmmmm.

I only eat meat 2-3 times a week any more and this is one of my favorite dishes. I like it better without the gumbo vegetable mix, though.

Rice on lettuce with tofu.

Tac salad without the greasy shell.

More Cheap Soup

Yesterday I bought a case of chicken ramen, a head of cabbage, and a bag of carrots. I already have a bottle of soy sauce. Here’s what you do: cut the cabbage into shreds. Peel a carrot clean, then peel the clean carrot into shreds. Throw the veggies into 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Throw in the ramen and reduce to a simmer. Add the chicken stock and some soy sauce. Stir and simmer until the noodles are cooked.

Not into ramen? Use chicken stock and either pre-cooked rice or pre-cooked pasta of your choice. The real issue is cooking the veggies in the stock until tender.

Lazy Egg Salad Sammich

There are a pair of dilemmas to address here. First,

1. You need to eat
2. You don’t have time to cook
(2a. You somehow think you can’t cook. Bah. Nonsense.)

Second, we have

1. Egg salad is tasty
2. Peeling hard boiled eggs is a pain.

Fear not! There is a solution. I call this Lazy Egg Salad, and it take no more than 2 to 3 minutes to make. First, fry an egg, piercing the yolk so it cooks hard. Too complicated? Beat an egg with a folk, in a microwave-safe bowl, and pop it into the microwave for 90 seconds. While that’s going on, take two slices of bread. Spread mayo on one side, a wee bit of mustard on the other. Put a teaspoon of pickle relish on the mustard side if you like. Add lettuce and a slice of tomato on the mayo side if that floats your boat. Put the egg in the middle, close ‘er up and eat the thing. Doesn’t taste like egg salad? Add more mayo and a dash of paprika. Still doesn’t taste like egg salad to you? Then start boiling eggs and do it the hard way. Sheesh, you’re doing it the easy way and want perfection?

Seriously, if you want to wait longer you can let the fried/nuked egg cool, chop it up, and make the rest of the egg salad the “normal” way. You still don’t have to do the peel thing, so you’ve bypassed that.

Turkey Hot Dogs

My sad food budget: got a 24-pack of reduced-fat turkey hot dogs for $2. yeah, that’s 8.3 cents per hot dog. And that’s normal price, they weren’t marked down because they were about to go funny or anything.

Grill them in the toaster oven — I turn the temp all the way up to 500 and turn the timer to the max — because it’s too hot to grill outside and it also resembles effort. Put a strip of bell pepper and onion in for each dog as well, cut to the length of the dog. About 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the timer, add hot dog buns to toast (whole wheat ones if you can get them, or good sandwich rolls), opened up so they get nice and warm on the inside. While all that’s happening, slice some tomato into thin wedges and hit them with some celery salt. Slice some pepperocinis and dab them with a paper towel. Spread some horseradish or hot mustard on the bun, add the hot dog, onion, bell pepper, pepperocini and tomato. Yeah, baby. That’s being a champagne foodie on a beer budget.

Soup Doctor

Some of my favorite things to cook are soups and stews in a crock pot. The downside to that is that it’s hard to not cook for a small army. Usually I’ll pack leftovers into containers and eat them over the course of a week, or freeze them if possible, but I don’t always want to do that. Canned soups are notoriously blah, in my opinion. If they’re not blah, they’ve got enough sodium to give a rhinocerous a coronary. “Lite”, low-sodium and no-sodium soups marketed as healthy alternatives tend to be thin, waterly, and largely flavorless. So what can you do, if you want some decent soup but only want a couple of servings?

Use the canned soup as a base. I don’t look as canned soup as a finished product. It’s a starting point, that I can dress up and customize. Think of it as canned broth with bits in it — in a good way. Focus on the broth, not the overall soup. Adding to it can not only make it palatable, it can make it downright appetizing. Here are a few tricks I use to fix soup. Note that these are mix-and-match; don’t try to do all of these at once. Eww.

Instant potatoes. Heat the soup in a pan, and slowly stir in mashed potatoes flakes or buds until it thickens up a bit. I use plain potato flakes, not butter-flavored or anything like that, so that I retain control of the flavor. I rarely add any additional liquid, unless I accidentally add too many potatoes.

Half and half. With the right soup, a little half-and-half can fix consistency and add a little flavor. Not much is needed. I jusge it by color and consistency.

Frozen vegetables. Stick to whatever’s already in the soup, just increase the volume. I prefer frozen veggies because I can add a little, put a twist tie on the bag and toss it back in the freezer. I don’t have that sort of portion control with canned veggies.

Hot sauce. Not for every type of soup, admittedly, but even a couple of drops can add some zing to any tomato-based or vegetable-based stock. A great option when you don’t want to add any more sodium.

Soy sauce. I use the “lite” stuff to control sodium. A couple of dashes of soy helps out any non-tomato broth base — beef, chicken, or vegetable. Don’t overdo it, you can easily make the soup taste like bad Chinese food if you do. Dash, stir, taste, repeat.

Worcester sauce. A dash or two in a beef-based broth brings out a lot of flavor. Again, dash, stir, taste, repeat as needed, it’s easy to overdo it if you’re not careful.

Spices. There are five things I use as go-tos: onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, thyme, and celery salt. When I cook “for real” I use real onions and garlic, but adding fresh ingredients to canned soup is, frankly, weird. You can tell. It doesn’t match. If you use onion/garlic salt rather than powder, be conscious that you’re adding salt as well. Seems obvious, but I’d rather warn you again. Oregano for anything Italian, Mexican, or tomato-based that doesn’t already have detectable amounts of oregano in it. Thyme for any lighter tastes, like vegetable or chicken broth. celery salt for vegetable or fish-based stock, understanding that you’re also adding salt (my rule of thumb is, if I can see celery in the soup, it needs more celery salt).

As an example, before I wrote this I had canned crab soup for dinner. Vegetable broth, very watery. As I heated it in the pan, I added some potato flakes and a little half-and-half to give it more of a seafood chowder consistency. It had corn in it, so I added more frozen corn. When the consistency was right I tasted it. Needed a little salt, just to bring out the existing flavors rather than to add flavor. There was celery in the soup, so I added celery salt. I wanted to give it the mildest hint of a kick, so I added a couple of drops of hot sauce. After allowing it to simmer a few minutes, I pronounced it delicious.

Pesto Pasta

My current diet precludes wheat (gluten), onions, tomatoes, sugar, alcohol, and chocolate. I know! So of course the first thing I want is spaghetti. Easy enough! Rice pasta to the rescue, as usual. I took some olive oil, mixed in so garlic, basil (lot of basil) and oregano (easier on the oregano) and made my own faux-pesto. To add a little more vegetable matter, I shredded a carrot and threw it in with the pasta right before the pasta was done, just long enough for the carrot to blanch a little. Cooked and drained the pasta, tossed in the pesto, hit it with some grated Parmesan cheese, voila! It is food.

Salad

A habit I have is making a ton of something and then eating the same thing for several days in a row. Hey, if it tastes great, I’ll eat it again, and usually it’s all gone before I start getting sick of it. I mention this because someone I know, for some reason, bought a giant container of crumbled feta cheese and gave me a bunch of it. I need to eat it up before it goes bad, because I hate wasting food. It being too hot to want to cook, I decided to make a Greek Salad.

Start with a bed of fresh spinach. Sprinkle on some crumbled feta, sliced red onion, sliced pepperocinis, thin-sliced cucumber, and canned black olives. For some protein, and because it’s too hot to cook, I shredded rotisserie chicken and added it. Use a caesar dressing, oil and vinegar, or tzatziki sauce.

For variations, try leaving off the pepperocinis and black olives, and using grapes and tzatziki sauce or oil and vinegar. Make a dressing out of the pepperocini juice, olive oil, fresh ground black pepper, and some paprika (I leave off the pepperonis and just chop one up in the dressing for this).

You can take the above ingredients and stuff them into a pita pocket or make a wrap, if you want some carbs. Use more chicken, and I suggest using tzatziki sauce so your sandwich doesn’t get messy or runny.