Now that temperatures are down to 20C (translate your own F people), I can finally spend some time in the kitchen and cook a delicious roomie lunch. My two cents from today’s experience: it’s all in the detail. Cooking ain’t a big picture thing.
How do I know that? Because my mouth is literally on fire right now because I put three tablespoons of Salsa Lizano on 1/3 of the quantity I was supposed to use. And this is no the first time this has happened. A while back, I was cooking some Chinese dish. I halved everything in the recipe, except for I doubled the ginger. Outcome = Inedible.
Then much recently, making cookies with H, I decided that substituting a teaspoon of coarse ground salt with a teaspoon of regular salt will produce the exact same effect. Well… it didn’t. Not until people were wondering why the cookies were so salty is that I realized that that little detail did matter. Now, with this super helpful tip, you should definitely try the recipe. Coz these cookies were awesome!
Just look at this!
Oaky, let’s not get off track, this was supposed to be a post about rice, as promised by my fabulous co-writer Maki. And since I’m white and I only understand white people’s rice (yeah, this probably sounds more offensive when I say it), my recipe involves instant brown rice. lol It takes 10 mins to cook, it’s that instant.
You cook the rice, according to the directions (mhm, I’ve messed up rice enough times to actually start following cooking directions). You should probably start with the black beans because they take longer. Either way, you want to start with equal quantity of rice and black beans pre-cooked. Then chop some onion and garlic, sauté with olive oil (can’t cook anything without olive oil, which may or may not have been party of the original recipe, but let’s not spend more time on this), throw in the rice and black beans, mix well and splurge as much as you want on the Salsa Lizano (this is a Costa Rican sauce thing, not really salsa).
Outcome = Very edible, although slightly hot
Gallo Pinto
Finally, in case you were wondering, the best way to procure Salsa Lizano, is fly to Costa Rica, spend some time on the beach, eat some of the awesome Gallo Pinto there and figure out your own best recipe. Ditto.
