It’s New Year’s Day and I’m making rice and beans. Actually, it’s pronounced more like: rice’n beans. Rice and peas, my neighbors call them. In some parts of the world people eat them for good luck. Here, they are a main stay in the diet.
Along this Caribbean coast they are made with coconut milk and served with jerk chicken, fish, or pork chops and a shredded cabbage salad. If you want this same meal with white rice and red beans on the side, you ask for a casado. Literally translated it means married. To get real rice and beans you ask for rice’n beans with chicken (or whatever). You can order it in most restaurants, but there are outstanding rice and pea cooks and some that are not so great.
In all the time I’ve lived here, I’ve never gotten the recipe right. Partly that’s because the women here have no written recipe as we know them: one cup of this and two cups of that. They tend to cook the way their mothers did, pouring in some of this and some of that and they know how it should look to make it right. Every time I’ve watched someone make rice and beans something has come up that took me out of the kitchen just as they added the liquid, and they DON’T WANT THAT LID LIFTED. NO SIR. Consequently, I had to fend for myself.
For a long time, I thought the two were cooked separately and then mixed together when done. When I found out that wasn’t the case I asked about the liquid. How do you balance the liquid already in the beans with what is required to cook the raw rice?
“It’s just a knuckle above the rice. That’s all,” Miss Olga once explained as though I were daft for asking. I got various other answers along these lines and began to over-think the problem. Was she talking about the “Tip Segment?” – The phalanx with the fingernail, or the “Middle Segment?” – The middle phalanx. The “Top Knuckle?” – The upper joint, closest to the fingernail. “Middle Knuckle?” – The middle joint. You get the idea.
I have made them dry, the rice not fully cooked for lack of liquid. I have made them soggy from too much. I’m looking for that Goldilocks recipe this year and spent last week searching the Internet. Most of the recipes referred to using a can of red kidney beans. No cans here at the end of the road but there are dried beans enough to ballast a freighter.
I finally found, what I think is my answer… it’s cooking as we speak, and perhaps––just perhaps––they will warrant a picture when they are done.
Alan went out into the potrero this morning and fetched a coconut, husked it, drained off the liquid in pan, and broke it into pieces. I took the meat and liquid and, using my blender, shredded the meat. No grater for this girl; my knuckles have enough scars from abuse over the years and I don’t need more. The locals have these enormous homemade galvanized ones they call “scratchers.” That is exactly what you end up doing to yourself with one of those, too.
Then I took red beans I soaked overnight and cooked them with a panameño pepper (scotch bonnet) thyme, a little garlic, and some onion. I can’t cook without those last two ingredients. A friend of my husband’s claims he can’t eat food that includes garlic or onion. I could never be married to a man like that, that’s for sure.
Once the beans were tender I fried up a bit of onion, garlic, a little cilantro, and red pepper in a large pot. Added the beans (2 cups) and stirred in the white rice (1 cup). Once those were nicely mixed, I added the coconut milk and enough water to cover the mixture by three quarters of an inch. I know. This sounds exactly like Miss Olga’s recipe, but at least it was specific and not a “knuckle.” It turns out they are roughly the same measurement.
Here are the results:
I have to say the rice and peas are quite good. I still don’t feel I’ve conquered the light and fluffy rice that Miss Olga used to make, but then she will be 95-years-old this February and has a lot of lead time on me. I suppose if I were to make them every day, or even once a week, as she did, I might get there in a few years. I don’t know if she still dabbles in cooking as she’s moved to Limon to live with her son, Alfonso. And it might simply be that I remember her cooking and loved her cooking hand, as they call it here.
My husband says they are delicious, but then what else is he supposed to say? It’s like asking him whether a dress makes me look fat. He’s not touching that one, either!
And here is a bit of eye-candy for dessert. This buttefly and some congo bees were working a flower out in the yard by the new pond yesterday.
The Lunar New Year, which begins today, ushers in the Year of the Ox. Those born under this sign are said to be dependable, calm, modest and stable. 
