Happy Monday, plant lovers! Today I have a Mrs. Mini for you! This is a super-simple recipe. I ended up making this the first time on a weekend, thinking it would take more time. Now, it’s a go-to weeknight meal! It’s also good cold if you end up with leftovers.
You’ll need three things! Potatoes, red beans, and salsa or pico de gallo. For potatoes, I opted for little redskins. I got a small bag of them at Whole Foods (organic, because I eat the skins). Since I was just making this for myself, I only needed a handful of them.
Now, you can bake, roast, or steam the potatoes. While I do love roasted potatoes, I decided to throw these in the vegetable steamer while I prepared the rest of the dish. My vegetable steamer is one of the most-used appliances in my kitchen. It’s versatile and handy and easy to clean. It has a rice cooker feature and 3 tiers in which to cook separate vegetables!
As our little potatoes steam, we can prepare the red beans. I went with kidney beans. I’m sure you could go with any type of bean with this meal, but I happened to have kidney beans on hand and the original recipe called for red beans. I’ve learned something recently about beans. If you use the dry beans, sometimes it’s not enough to just soak them. Recently using dry chickpeas and black beans, I found they were not very soft once I went to eat them. Add the soaked beans to a pot of water and simmer them for about an hour on low heat. It made a huge difference!
The kidney bean prep was simple, as I used canned beans. Rinse, drain.
Lastly, the pico. As metioned earlier, you can use salsa too. Mr. FBBQ was kind enough to pick me up some fresh pineapple-mango pico de gallo from the store. Normally, I would make my own pico or salsa (keep an eye out for future post on mango-cucumber salsa). This weekend, I was short on time.
Once the potatoes were done cooking (cut them into smaller pieces for quicker cooking time), I put them in a bowl. Top the potatoes with the red beans and add the salsa on top. Voila! The fruity salsa was a great addition, as it contrasted well with the starchy potatoes and beans. Perfect!!!
