I cooked food for Nicaragua a month ago, but I am just getting to posting about it. Sometimes life and laziness get in the way... For Nicaragua, I chose their national dish, which also happens to be a popular dish throughout Latin America--gallo pinto. In essence, gallo pinto is just rice and beans. Its name means "spotted/painted rooster" in Spanish. It's eaten as a side dish for breakfast (with a fried egg), lunch, and dinner, as an accompaniment to almost anything.
It starts with boiling the beans. The kind of bean used varies by country, but in Nicaragua the most common is the small Central American red bean. It was difficult to find the beans by themselves; my local grocery stores didn't have them, they only had Goya's pre-packaged gallo pinto (like making a box of Uncle Ben's). I ended up ordering a bag on Amazon and paying too much because my other options were to buy a 6 pack of the bags of dried or a 24 pack of the cans.
I soaked the beans for probably two days and they still took forever to soften when I boiled them. It was a really hot day and I was literally holding an ice pack to my face while waiting for those beans to boil because cooking with gas means the flame also significantly raises the temperature in a small kitchen. Once the beans were mostly cooked, they were added to a pot with sauteed onion and vegetable oil.
The recipe called for a 1/3 cup of oil, which seemed like a lot. I just eyed it and didn't use as much as called for.
Into the pot goes a couple cups of the liquid used to cook the beans, along with white rice and salt.
The mixture is covered and simmered for 20 minutes until the liquid has all been absorbed and the rice is cooked through. A few of my beans were a little on the crunchy side, though still edible, but the rice was cooked perfectly. The oil actually added a nice fatty element that I wouldn't think to add to rice and beans.
I served my gallo pinto with tortillas, queso fresco, salsa, and tomatoes. I also added some hot sauce and oregano on top. I ended up with a ton of the rice and beans so I was eating this dish for lunch just about every day for a week. And I certainly didn't complain!
Recipes Used: Gallo Pinto
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