The country of the week for My Kitchen My World is Cuba! I was not sure off the top of my head what recipes to try, but after doing a few internet searches on Cuban dishes, I knew one of them had to be Cuban black beans and rice. Many of the recipe for this dish that I looked over called for dried beans cooked in a pressure cooker -- perfect! I got a Cook's Essentials 5 quart electric pressure cooker right before Christmas and this was my first time using it. I was nervous at first, a pressure cooker is kind of intimidating, but I figured I'd just give it a try with these beans and not be too worried about the end result, if they were great, wonderful, if they weren't, well it is probably because I've never used a pressure cooker before.
Many of the Cuban bean pressure cooker recipes called for the beans to be soaked overnight -- but I didn't. I was just going with the "try it out and see" method, wondering if the beans could be done without soaking, which I know is supposed to make them more digestable, but I was more concerned with texture and flavor. So I just rinsed and picked through a bag of dried black beans, plopped them in the pressure cooker, added water and hoped they would turn out. I completely guessed at the time, 15 minutes at high pressure, and guess what? They turned out!
I served them over rice with some cheese, sour cream, and salsa. I am really impressed with how fast the cooked in the pressure! Can't wait to try out some more bean recipes in there :) If anyone knows of any great meatless pressure cooker recipes, please let me know. I'll be sure to post more pressure cooker recipes as soon I do some more trial and error.
While searching for Cuban recipe I came across this website with a recipe for Cuban Pastelitos that was really simple and sounded yummy. What caught my eye was the guava filling, and guess what I picked up on netgrocer a month or so ago? Guava jelly! I'm always on the lookout for jams and jellies that I can't find locally (since the kids love toast and jam) and had never tried guava jelly before! It had been sitting in the pantry and I wasn't quite sure what to expect but it was a great filling for the pastelitos with some cream cheese.
They were just like mini turnovers and a fun treat to have after our Cuban beans and rice lunch.
Due to the extremely busy holidays, I missed the two MKMW countries that were picked before Cuba -- France and the Phillipines, but plan to do make-ups for them sometime soon. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend, happy cooking :)