It feels weird to say, but until a couple weeks ago I never understood how to make beans and rice. It sounds so simple, you just combine beans and rice right? But in my head I kept thinking "wow that sounds bland, that sounds awful, how would I ever eat that?".
Well the answer as it turns out is spices, but there's a trick to keeping the spices low effort. Here's like a minimum list of things I would use
- can of beans
- rice, whatever you like
- curry powder (a mix of curry-related spices u can find premixed)
- salt
- ideally a lil bit of oil or butter cause i like it like that
And to go the extra mile:
- ground pepper (optional)
- lemon juice (optional)
- hot sauce (optional)
- cheese (optional)
That's not skipping anything that's the whole-ass ingredients list!
For the beans, you can get whatever beans. I've been liking baked beans that are usually cooked in a broth with some good flavors already. You can get black beans, refried beans, there's beans out there!
So then what do I do?
- Cook the rice in a pot
- Put in some oil or butter
- Open the beans, put them in the same pot
- Put some curry powder in there
- Put some salt in there
- Put some pepper in there
- Put the lemon juice in there
- Put the hot sauce in there
- Mix it all up
- Once it's to the temperature I want, put some in a bowl and put cheese on top to melt
That is it my friends! One pot, everything is just pouring stuff in the pot, and there's not so many individual things to add in that I get overwhelmed. I can scale this up or down to however many cans of beans I want to make at a time and then put the rest in the fridge, so the next time I want some I just warm it up and add cheese. I didn't know good food could be this easy!
And then if I want to add some vegetables I can get frozen veggies and just add in however much I think should go in.
I'm so incredibly beanbrained after figuring this out you have no idea. I can be barely capable of thinking or standing up and still make a good enough version of this to eat (and in fact this is the state I was in when I figured this out, amazingly). Hot damn!