We've all got one; a group of friends who get together and talk about food, share recipes and techniques and generally shoot the shit. Ours just happens to be foul-mouthed and unabashed. This blog is a collaboration of authors (even occasionally male!) who share a love of booze, profanity, food and bitching.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Pinterest

So yeah, trying to revive some blogs up in here. I've still been cooking, more now than usual even because I just got called back to work after my layoff and cash be tight, yo. One way to counteract the poor is brownbagging ye lunch, and I do it fairly often (until I start making enough cash to waste on takeout pizza). And a lot of the recipes I've been making have been via Pinterest. Yes, I drank the Kool-Aid, and a-Pinteresting I go. Needless to say, I've gotten mixed results.

I use Pinterest in two ways, 1 - straight up ganking recipes. And 2 - stealing ideas, forgetting to pin them, and then making up how I think they probably go. The latest one of these was the idea of a meatless entreƩ using black beans and corn over a baked potato. I liked this idea because meat's expensive (no, I have no moral objections to meat. Deal.), and I figured I could take it to work. The problem I have with a lot of recipes (especially "healthy" ones) is that they don't travel well, or assemble quickly. I've got half an hour to eat at work, and I don't drive. At work we have a microwave and a toaster that doesn't really work (it warms rather than toasts a bagel), so I need something that can survive that and still be edible.

So this recipe came on a site that had like a dozen more that all involved lentils or some nonsense that I don't have, and so I forgot to pin it for the single recipe I thought I'd do. Oops. So here's my reconstruction!

First off, I baked a bunch of potatoes. There's really no point in baking 1 potato ever. Don't waste electricity/gas by running your oven for one damn potato, do a bunch and have homefries the next day or whatever. Or soup.

Next I chopped up 1/4 of a big onion and sauteƩd it. Then I took a can of reduced-sodium black beans and drained and rinsed them, and tossed them in with the onions. I took half a bag of frozen corn that I had mouldering in the freezer and tossed it in the skillet as is, then covered the whole lot for a bit to let it thaw and cook. My corn had some kind of "butter sauce" which normally gives me the heebie jeebies (what the hell is butter sauce? Is it actually butter, or is it yellow liquid? Best not to know), but since this was all going over a potato anyway, it wasn't going to hurt.

Anyway, once the corn had ceased to be a huge chunk of nonsense, I threw in some minced garlic, salt (seasoned salt in my case), black pepper, chili pepper (Penzey's natch), and smoked paprika. If you haven't tried smoked paprika, do yourself a favor and do so. It's magic, and makes food taste foodier. These are all, of course, highly astute and accurate observations I'm laying down here for you. Then I reduced the heat to a simmer and let it all blend for a bit. You don't have to cook this at high heat; the stuff in it is already cooked (excepting the onion at the beginning), you're just warming and combining things. Fork open your potato and toss that in with a bit of grated pepperjack and you're good to go. And hey, it wasn't bad! It kept well, traveled well, and with three minutes in the microwave for the potato and about 60 seconds for the bean mix, I still had time to read on my lunch break.