Can one produce black beans and rice with recaíto without black beans, rice, or recaíto?
Abstract
No.
Materials
sauté pan that gets more and more worrying by the day
trusty old pasta pot
spatula
lids (if you must)
glass bowl, goddess bless thrift stores
plate
bowl
one pound boneless, skinless chicken, frozen
10.5 oz can cream of mushroom soup
half that can water
half that can milk
more water
half a 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, which you have to use before they go bad, so why not now
indeterminate amount of canola oil, because wow, olive oil is not cheap
orzo ("how much"? do you not get how this works?)
teaspoon of salt
Recipe
Simultaneously:
* 1. Cook the rice. Remember, two parts water. * 1. Place the olive oil in a suacepan over medium heat. 2. Add the recaíto. 3. Cook two minutes or until it bubbles 4. Drain the beans, add to the pan. 5. Add the tomatoes, undrained. Stir. 6. Cook 15 minutes. 2. That's it.
Procedure
Decide to make this thing. You love beans and rice, and you're open to eating things with names you can't pronounce correctly. Maybe you can throw in some chicken! Get creative!
Come home. Roommate has taken his canola oil elsewhere.
It is his canola oil, so it's not like he's done anything wrong, but there go your plans.
Eat reheated leftovers from a previous cookventure.
Check supermarket for recaíto. Oddly, your podunk college town does not seem to put a high priority on this strange green mixture, though it does have entire shelves of what could be considered salsas.
Buy the beans. You should learn yourself how to make beans and rice, anyway.
Come home. You forgot to buy canola oil. Life sucks. Order a pizza.
Come home. Buy canola oil.
Roommate has taken his rice elsewhere. It was, again, his rice, so he is within his rice, but man, fuck. (Plus it was like fifty pounds? Did he bring friends over to take it??)
Fuck it. No more pizza. You are cooking something tonight.
Fill bowl with cold water and put in chicken for defrosting. You would have thought to use warm water, and you have done so in the past, but this apparently just encourages bacterial growth. Whoops.
Wait like an hour. Not working. Microwave at "defrost" setting until it's not icy any more.
Pour cream of mushroom soup into sauté pan, because you don't know what else you'd do with it.
It says to put in half a can of milk and half a can of water to make it thick. Do that.
Throw in the tomatoes. Stir.
Medium-high heat.
Wait, you should cook the chicken first.
Drain sauté pan into bowl, because why not.
Chop up chicken. Roommate took the cutting board too. Goddamn, dude.
Cook chicken until it doesn't remind you of lab any more.
Remove chicken.
Pour bowl of gunk back in.
Heat covered so that it boils.
Decide you might as well use up the orzo while you're at it, so start boiling a couple quarts of water.
Gunk is boiling. Pour in chicken. Reduce heat to low.
Wait.
Wait.
Pasta water is boiling. Pour in pasta.
Pour in the amount of salt it says to on the pasta box, roughly. That is way more salt than you have been adding.
Wait for the amount of time it says on the box. Probably. Maybe.
Drain pasta.
Pour pasta into chicken gunk.
Done.
Results
You guess this is a soup? It is mostly soup by volume, after all. You put it in a bowl instead of on the plate you used for chicken relocation.
It's actually not too bad, though, considering it has all the unity of the UNSC [NOTE TO EDITOR: replace with timely reference as appropriate].
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Your mom is good at making fettucine alfredo with sausage and pepper. So good, in fact, that you have declared it your favorite meal - partly just in case anyone asks what your favorite meal is, but you really do like it. So now that you're paying rent to sit in an unfurnished room, why not give it a shot?
Materials
Solid three dollar pot that's usually large enough for a pound of pasta
Sauté pan that cost three dollars to buy and probably even less to manufacture
Nice metal colander
Your roommate's medium saucepan, as long as you clean it
Cutting board
Cheese grater
A skillet because you don't actually have bowls
Microwave bowl that is not nearly big enough for how much food is about to happen
Cheap plate with this dumb rounded square shape
Two plastic spatulas, neither of which seem that great
One knife, which is not nearly enough knives, generally speaking
Cling wrap
Computer with internet access in another room
Phone with internet access for backing track of your choice
Tapwater that may be unsafe to drink
Salt
1 lb fettucine pasta
1 lb italian sausage, which you've been told you can make yourself, but let's be real
2 cups heavy cream (it says "heavy whipping cream", which was enough to make you have to look it up online at the store to make sure it was the right stuff)
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, solid
3/4 mozzarella cheese, pre-grated, looks disgusting frankly but you made this penne stuff that was okay with it, a few days ago, so maybe it's alright
3 tbsp artificial butter substitute (vegetable oil? how do they do that? you should look that up, if it's not patented)
2 tbsp canola oil even though the recipe said olive oil, after finding an internet article saying they're mostly interchangeable but canola is worse
Some more canola oil
1 green pepper
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
Recipe
Simultaneously:
* 1. Boil fettucine in water for twelve minutes or until al dente. 2. Drain. * 1. Melt butter, olive oil in saucepan on medium heat. 2. Once melted, add garlic, heavy cream, and 1/4 cup white pepper. Simmer, stir. 3. Add parmesan. Simmer 8-10 minutes or until thick and smooth. 4. Add mozzarella. Stir. * 1. Chop up the onion and pepper. 2. Deglove sausage, cut into bite-sized chunks, and put it in a pan with some oil. 3. Brown sausage. 4. Add onion and pepper. Stir to soften and brown it further. 5. Sprinkle with Italian herbs. 6. Add a little water. Cover, simmer for 5-10 minutes. 2. Add sauce to pasta. 3. Serve pasta and sausage stuff in separate bowls. Feeds 4-6 or you for a week.
Procedure
Get a two-SMS recipe from your mom, hope you can figure it out.
Look up recipe for alfredo sauce on the internet, which is what Mom actually said to do.
Gather materials. Abort if you do not have materials. Put the pot and the pan and the saucepan on the stove, but leave the skillet because you don't realize you need it until later.
Grate some cheese. As it turns out you cannot grate into a half-cup measuring cup, so grab a cheap microwave bowl for cheese detritus.
Put like a pound... (is that how imperial units work? You avoid imperial units outside of cooking where it's how all the directions are written) of water in the large pot. (Wow, actually you put in a gallon and that's like nine pounds? Water is heavy, you reflect.)
Add some salt to the future pasta water. You don't know how much salt. "To taste", says the recipe. Taste what, salt water? Later you realize you were supposed to add the salt at some vague later point.
Set the large pot's burner on high heat while you figure everything else out. That shit always takes forever.
Put the butter in the saucepan but don't turn it on because you're not sure what order things should be done in just yet.
Cut up the onion. The recipe says 1" pieces but can that be right? Oh well, you figure your mom wouldn't kill you intentionally.
Cut open the pepper. Wow, these things have seeds inside! Are you supposed to eat those?
Look up video on YouTube of how to cut up a pepper. Feel sheepish. For the first thirty seconds, you're not sure it isn't HowToBasic.
Salvage the previously cut pepper to remove the parts the YouTube video had removed, probably, sorta.
Run out of room on the cutting board.
Deglove italian sausage and cut it into bite-size chunks, directly in the sauté pan. The metal already has weird burns on it, a few cut marks can't hurt.
Stare sadly at unmelted butter. Contemplate life and its transience.
Add the 2 tbsp canola oil to the butter and turn heat to... medium? Medium-high? Does it matter?
Pour a random amount of canola oil into the sauté pan. Probably another few tablespoons?
Activate whatever heat is going into the saucepan on the sauté pan as well. Consistency is key.
Stare at not-yet-boiling pasta water. Stir rapidly melting butter and oil, and the sausage.
Try that trick your roommate showed you where you just crush the garlic with the flat of the blade. It sort of works. Cut up the rest on the tiny corner of the cutting board not occupied by vegetables. (Is pepper a vegetable? No, it's a fruit, you remember.)
Throw the garlic in the saucepan. The sausage still isn't totally brown. Ugh. Stir it you guess.
Pour the heavy cream into the saucepan. Do not add 1/4 tsp white pepper, because you do not have white pepper. Stir. Wow, it's cool how it kind of stays separate from the butter/oil.
Okay sausage is pretty brown now. Awkwardly pour chopped pepper and onion into the sauté pan. It's big enough, thankfully; that was close.
Your mom said to add Italian "herbs" - presumably seasoning - to the sausage at this point, but if it's "Italian sausage" it already has that stuff, right?
Pasta water is boiling. Take off the cover. Throw in pasta. Recall previous cooking advice about avoiding a "gelatinous mass".
Stir everything. Can't go wrong with stirring, you think. (You can.)
Turn phone away from Autechre to check mom's recipe again.
Put some water in the sauté pan and cover it. Try to remember what "simmer" means; you're supposed to be simmering the saucepan as well.
Look it up on Wikipedia. Cooking in a pan/pot with water that's almost but not boiling? That's pretty slick. Also hard for you to manage.
Pour in the parmesan.
Fiddle with heat controls for several minutes, attempting to not boil water. Fail.
Stir everything more.
Pasta has boiled for twelve minutes. Dump it in the colander, which has its place in the sink surrounded by food-encrusted cookware not otherwise appearing in this recipe. Nearly scald yourself. "scald" is kind of a cool word.
Add mozzarella to saucepan. Stir. Wonder if the onions are cooked enough.
After the sauté pan has been going for probably ten minutes - you're not totally sure, but the onions are kind of brown - remove it from heat.
Remove sauce from heat.
Look for bowls large enough to hold several pounds of food. Fail.
Grab skillet, put on unheated burner.
Pour everything into skillet.
Stir with spatulas. Spatulae. This doesn't work very well and you spill goop all over the stove. You reflect that this goop is supposed to be alfredo sauce.
Put some amount of product on a plate. Eat.
Put remainder of product in a glass cooking... pan... thing... that thing that's used for meatloaf, and in the microwave bowl. You don't have any bowl big enough to fit all of it at once.
Text your mom a photo of the results.
Blog.
Clean new Superfund site.
Results
Decent. Better than a premade meal, but that's not saying much. Not as good as Mom's, obviously. With some improvement it could be pretty great by college student standards.
Mom says it "actually looks pretty good".
Most importantly, it's, like, several pounds of food. Leftovers for a week.
Conclusions
Sauce was way too thin. You're not sure what to do about that. The internet recipe said at various points to wait for "smoothness" but that never really happened; maybe you were heating it too much and it boiled?
Mom said not to use mozzarella. That is "for cassaroles", apparently. You're not sure what a cassarole is, despite that you've presumably had them before. In any case, it's an opportunity to avoid the plasticine stuff.
Pasta was fine, so maybe now you've got this "al dente" business down. (Boiling water - very challenging.) Sausage/pepper/onion concoction was fine. You weren't sure whether you were supposed to drain the grease before adding it, but it seems to be okay with the grease. Something to ask mom about.
The sauce is clearly the most difficult component of this meal. You could probably use some premade stuff, but ugh. Other recipes you found on the internet mentioned parsley and other exotic plants. This will take some experimentation. Maybe you can make a bunch of different recipes and refrigerate it? Would it suck after refrigeration?
Also, your mom suggested serving with garlic bread. Not having garlic bread was a major oversight. Generally speaking, why would you ever not have garlic bread?
