Casado con vegetales (comida tipica)

Casado is a plate full of food guaranteed to satisfy all your tastebuds, salty and sugary alike. At the base of every casado is the salty black beans and rice as well as a small cold salad, and the sugary fried plantain. To this, you may add a variety of cooked vegetables or a choice of meat. The casado you see in the picture below is my rendition of the one Josh and I kept going back to in Santa Teresa, in Costa Rica, which replaced the plaintain with fried yucca plant (see the recipe I give for this as it needs to be prepped the night before). The 10 students who participate in Josh and my food club, three of whom you can see below serving themselves and getting ready to dive in, can attest to the fact that it's delicious, healthy and very simple to make!

Take any vegetable (We used cauliflour, broccoli and carrot here) and prep them for roasting with salt, pepper and olive oil (my favorite), sauteeing or boiling. While the vegetables are cooking, prep the rice and beans, and the salad.

For the rice, mince a clove of garlic, half a small hot pepper and 1 or 2 scallions. Sautee these things in olive oil, add the rice (basmati is best) and stir to cover with oil. Add salt and the required amount of water and bring to boil then simmer for 20 minutes.

For the beans, sautee some chopped onion in olive oil until translucent. Add canned beans with their liquid, salt, pepper and cumin (optional - the Ticos didn't use spices as far as I could tell, but I love cumin too much to pass it up), and simmer.

You can prep any simple salad you want as a side. In the casado seen above, the salad consists of shredded carrot and cabbage with a simple vinagrette (1 part vinegar, two parts olive oil, minced garlic, salt and pepper).

Near the end of everything being ready, heat a few inches of oil in a deep cast-iron pan or deep fryer for the yucca plant, and cook as instructed in the recipe I give in a previous blog.

Faux Curry Cream Sauce

Looking for a way to turn broccoli stalks and the stems of other greens into a hearty meal? A few nights ago we ate broccoli and collard greens in a simple stir fry and saved all the stalks and stems to make a broth. Once the greens were all boiled down and we'd transfered the rich, translucent green water into jars for storing, we looked at the ghosts of the vegetables we were about to throw out and decided against it, thinking that the most peasant-esque thing to do would be to make use of the whole shebang.


Here's what you need: Boiled-down brocolli and greens stems, some of the water used to boil it, a large potato, peeled and cubed, onion, garlic, salt, pepper and curry powder.




Boil the stalks and potatos in just enough of the water to cover and salt. Meanwhile, chop an onion into fairly small pieces and mince a couple cloves of garlic. Heat some olive oil in a dutch oven and sautee the onions and garlic with a teaspoon or two of cumin until very soft.


When the stocks and potato are so soft they fall apart at the slightest touch, throw them into a food processor with the steel blade. Add the onions and spice mix. Cover and blend, adding the water slowly through the top shoot until you get a very thick, creamy consistency.



Return this faux cream sauce to the dutch oven and add about a cup of spinach. When we made this, we didn't have any fresh spinach on hand, so we used frozen and it came out fine. Adjust seasonings.

We ate this sauce over brown rice and with a side of roasted name.

Total prep and cook time : a few hours (largely unattended)

Total cost (for the sauce) : not even a dollar

Total cost for the whole meal you see above for two people : about 4$