Michael & Liz are Bloggable

Anyone who has listened to The Dave Ramsey Show has heard it before. If you want to get out of debt you have to get mad. You have to get gazelle intense, throw everything at your debt snowball and make every sacrifice to win. You have to eat beans & rice and rice & beans and never see the inside of a restaurant unless you are working there.

Well to be honest, while we were getting out debt, we never really ate beans & rice. We continue to scrimp and save and live on less than we make, but we haven't gone as far as to eat the cheapest meal ever made. This week a friend of mine, Jason, gave us a recipe for a delicious beans & rice recipe and I was intrigued. We tried it tonight and it was AWESOME.

At one point I said to Liz, "you know how much money we would save if we..." and Liz stopped me in my tracks and said "I am NOT eating rice & beans for a whole month." She knows me too well. The brilliance of this meal. It cost us exactly $1.62 in groceries when you exclude the stuff we already had in our pantry (like onion and peppers and stuff). Now that's some good math. It made 3 very full servings.

Here is the picture and followed up by the recipe.


I apologize for the language in the recipe, but that's how it was written, and it does add some humor to cooking. I highly recommend it:

Take a lesson from the Puerto Ricans. Millions of us have managed to survive in one of the most expensive cities on earth with recipes like this:
Find a supermarket that has black beans on sale. Buy as much as you can. Then buy 5 or so pounds of Carolina rice, a bag of onions, a few bulbs of garlic, and a box of Goya Sazon.
Set 2 cups of water to boil
Throw in one cup of rice, turn the heat down to simmer and lid that shit
Slice up a small onion
Smash up a clove of garlic
Throw some olive oil or butter into a HOT pan.
Throw the onions and garlic into the pan and fry them till the onion gets glassy. Throw some salt in there.
Grind some pepper in there for good luck.
Toss in half a packet of Sazon and stir till you get a paste. Now you have a ghetto sofrito.
Dump in your can of beans bean juice and all.
Stir that shit up.
Add a pinch of Cayenne pepper so you remember that you have a set of cojones
Set that shit on simmer
Your rice is done.
Throw the beans on top.
Win
You should get at least 2 meals out of one can of beans, and if your lucky you can get black beans 2 for $1. Adding the cost of the Garlic, Sazon and a small onion and you still eat a tasty, hearty, relatively healthy meal for less than $1.

Jason's modifications:
So, he says HOT pan, I say medium / medium-hot, don't burn the oil / onions. Along with the onion I usually add a green pepper and hot pepper chopped. and I smash / very roughly chop 3 cloves of garlic. I slowly saute the onions / peppers until they are fairly soft.. I also use brown rice, so 2.5 cups of water to 1 cup of rice for 45 min on simmer.