One of Eric's favorite customers brought in some homemade pork tamales right before we went on vacation. I am not sold on the concept of sin, but it would have been something like it to let those go to waste. So I planned our Thursday night dinner around them.
I decided to make Spanish rice and refried beans as sides.*
We were out of canned beans. (Sort of. Eric is obsessed with making bean soup lately, so instead of black or pinto we had about eight million cans of white beans. I guessed those probably wouldn't do.) So I rinsed and soaked the giant bag of bulk dried pinto beans that had been hulking in our pantry after I bought them three years ago in a spasm of frugality. Then I made sure we at least had rice, tomatoes, and onions on hand before I left for work that morning.
I wanted to make hot sauce with the peppers I picked before the freeze destroyed the remnants of my summer garden,** but it turns out pepper sauce is labor intensive and potentially dangerous and has to sit for three days. That level of experimentation will have to wait for a weekend.
Ok. I get home from work that evening and start cooking beans. For three hours. They are very old and therefore tough, so they take a long time to cook. I stir them, I turn the heat up and down. I add bacon and spices and more water. I taste, groan, and turn the heat up a little more.
I start the rice, which requires a much bigger pan than the pot I usually use, plus the addition of tomatoes, onions, and peppers. I add extra time to accommodate the liquid in the vegetables. Eric gets home from work right as the timer is beeping. We taste the rice, declare it done, and turn off the burner so it can rest.
Then on to frying and mashing the beans with a potato masher, which takes approximately forever. I mash, add bean juice, mash some more. All this bean mashing's making me hungry, so I sneak in for a spoonful of rice. Only part of it is done; the rest is crunchy and terrible. I curse and turn a low flame under the rice pan and go back to mashing. I add more bean juice, mash some more. I get sick of mashing.
Eric takes over. He adds more bean juice, and mashes some more. I get sick of watching him mash and pull the immersion blender out of the cabinet. That's more like it--the beans succumb in seconds and ooze out from under the blades in pale, creamy ribbons.
Finally the beans are done, more or less, so I check the rice. It is delicious but overcooked, a mass of flavorful mush. I curse, a lot, while Eric heats the tamales in the microwave.
We pile the dry, too-smooth beans and gluey rice and perfect tamales on our plates and pour on bottled jalapeno sauce from the Mexican rotisserie place nearby. That's when I realize there are at least six places to buy rice and beans that are a thousand times better than what I made within a five-minute drive, and for less than five bucks at that.
I start to curse some more, but my mouth is full of food. To hell with it, at least the tamales were good. Plus if I ever move out of Texas, I will, with a little practice, be able to make myself a reasonable facsimile of restaurant-style rice and beans.
*Recipes linked were used as rough guides. Come to think of it, maybe I would have been more successful had I followed them more closely.
**Which, despite covering, died just as it was starting to flourish after the drought from hell; argh, argh, fuck, don't even get me started.