Week Ending 9 de noviembre

It's time for another episode of Week Ending, brought to you by the lovely Wanda at Reinventing Mother!


Friday morning I was watering around the house and I heard some noise on the other side of the fence. I looked through, and here's what I found:

This was part of a larger group which roams around our neighborhood. These are not wild horses, but around here animals have freedom to roam in their search for food. It's the same thing with cattle and goats. Since stock owners don't have the means to put up fences or buy food for them, the animals have traditionally been allowed to go where they will; it's simply an accepted part of life in rural Baja Sur.

Here's the whole gang, wandering down toward the corner of our road.

Saturday is the day when I do food prep for the week. In my case, that means cooking up a large pot of rice, another large pot of beans, a chicken, and anything else that takes my fancy. Then, during the week, I have the fixings ready for any number of tasty meals.

This is part of the result from this Saturday's cook-a-thon: chicken, rice, and a small amount of nopalitos (cactus pads).

I do my Saturday cooking outside on the wood stove. It's much more convenient to cook multiple pots of things on the wood stove than on a gas or electric stove.

I used about half of the beans I had been soaking to make a pot of Frijoles Borrachos (drunken beans). This is a very simple recipe and could easily be done in a slow cooker. The following amounts serve 3.

DRUNKEN BEANS
* Meats: I used ham bits, half a kosher hot dog, and a handful of pork rinds (a great addition, BTW!) However, any meat will do.
* A chopped onion
* 2 large cloves of garlic, diced
* 2 roma tomatoes, chopped
* 2 jalapeño chiles, seeds removed & diced
* 1 bottle of beer
* 1/2 lb of soaked dried beans (any kind is fine), or 2-3 cans of beans
* water as needed
* if you want the beans to have a smoky flavor, you can add some Liquid Smoke
* I added nopalitos to this pot (those long green things)
If you are using bacon or other meat with fat in it, put that in the pot first & cook until the fat has been rendered. Add the rest of the meat and cook until its flavor is starting to intensify, maybe 5 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, tomatoes and chiles and cook for another 5 minutes until softened. Add the beans and the beer; cover and put on a SLOW simmer. The amount of time for cooking depends on the kind of beans you're using, so if you're not sure how long it should take, check after 45 minutes, although it could take up to twice as long. Add a bit of water when necessary - not too much, because this isn't soup! Of course, with canned beans, the total cooking time will be much shorter. Once the beans are soft (but not mushy), if the pot has too much liquid, leave the lid off and turn the heat up a bit until the liquid is almost all gone (if you can push the contents to the side and see the bottom of the pot, you're there). This is a very tasty version of beans, and even better the next day.

Other than that, the only notable thing that I did this weekend was work on my crocheted top. I didn't finish it, as I had hoped, because when I'm reading and crocheting at the same time I slow WAYYY down. But I should be done by today to tomorrow.