Red beans and rice is on the menu this snowy Sunday
The recipe came from my neighbor who grew up in NoLa. They would make it for every birthday, holiday, snowy day, and LSU game and invite us over to enjoy.
These neighbors moved to Atlanta a couple of years ago but are still very much a big part in our lives. This recipe isnât just delicious: it is soul food from the memories I have yelling at the TV, the bottle opener that played the LSU fight song when we used it to open our sodas, singing happy birthday, and always having first Christmas and Mardi Gras celebrations in their home.
Those look so good! I havenât made red beans in a long time, but they are my momâs Monday night tradition. What nice memories you have of your neighbors, they sound like the best kind of neighbors!
Iâm always so surprised by how many LSU fans there are in Denver (thatâs where I went to college). I remember thinking when I moved to Colorado that I had escaped LSU football but LSU fans are everywhere! I didnât grow up in a football watching family, so it was wild to me to see that there is an entire bar in Denver dedicated to watching the gamesâŠ
It is wild how many LSU fans are in CO!! I wouldnât call myself an LSU fan, or a football fan, but we had a lot of fun watching the games. They were the best neighbors and a big reason why I have tried to build community with ours in this home too.
Todayâs adventure: no beans, but I used our homemade pasta sauce and pesto over rice! We had rice cooked, this was easier to throw together though.
I am going to find the white bean sauce recipe this week that my aunt in law once made for me. I remember it had lemon in it. Hopefully I can get it right in a few tries.
Already shared in another thread (and itâs kind of hard to see) but the whole base of this is rice and beans. My new thing is adding stuff to rice in the rice cooker and then blammo! Flavored rice. I used a tex mex seasoning on this one and some tomato sauce in lieu of part of the water. The beans were pinto, cooked from dry with ham hock and bay leaf. Topped it with chicken and salsa!
I made white kidney beans today because the internet claimed they are also called cannellini beans, and Iâve seen many recipes that use cannellini. And Iâm starting to think that I didnât like beans before because my experience was with really poorly cooked beans. Like, did everyone in my childhood just put canned beans straight into meals and not do any supplemental cooking? Or has my palate adjusted now that Iâm older that the things that bugged me about beans donât any more? Perhaps it is that I actually use oil and salt in my cooking, which my mom tried to avoid because 80s.
Anyways, they were good, and that was just straight from the pot, I havenât put them with anything yet.
This week I did the classic black bean, corn and salsa salad.
Planning lots of bean and lentil salads coming up. I diced shallots today for dinner (burgers) and will use them in another canned bean salad when the black bean one ends
3 bean chili with corn bread on top! Another budget bytes recipe for the win! Weâll see what my husband thinks- he doesnât like beans and has clarified a few times today that it is âmeatless chiliâ which he doesnât think should exist