Food Stamp Challenge Day 6: Gallo Pinto – and Gifts!

Today I was able to make one of my favorite dishes, a holdover from the time I spent in Costa Rica.  The informal national dish of Costa Rica is gallo pinto – spotted rooster – which is a jazzed-up dish of black beans and rice.  There are as many variants in Costa Rica as there are cooks…..you can vary the veggie ingredients based on what you have in the fridge.  In our house, the recipe looks like this:

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped small
3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1 red bell pepper, chopped, or a bag of frozen chopped mixed peppers
3 cups cold cooked rice
3 cups cooked black beans, drained
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
2 eggs
Sauce:  (when not on the challenge, we seek out Salsa Lizano in Latin grocery stores to be really authentic)
1/2 cup soy sauce or worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup any fruit juice
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon hot sauce

Whisk together sauce ingredients and set aside.

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat and add olive oil.  Saute onion, garlic, and peppers until soft. Add the rice and saute another 3 minutes until it starts to color a little. Add the beans and cook another 2 minutes.  Turn off the heat and mix in the sauce and cilantro.

In a separate skillet, fry the eggs to your taste. Serve the gallo pinto with a fried egg on top.

Gifts and Trades!

In the challenge rules, I decided that receiving gifts was perfectly okay (especially from people who weren’t trying to make sure we didn’t starve on the challenge), and that we could do some limited barter for things to add variety to our diet.

Today we received the gift of a dozen fresh eggs from our friend Rachel, one of our favorite neighborhood chicken-keepers — just think of all that protein…what a great gift!

We also traded some spent brewing grains for a big jug of goat milk, which I plan to turn into cheese this weekend.

We’re rich!

Category: Cooking, Food, Food Stamp Challenge Recipes, Money Saving, Recipes, Whole Foods Challenge