Cuban Style Black Beans With Fried Corn Tortillas

While there has been a focus on the mouth watering meat we cook up, especially during grilling season, Megan and I generally have at least one meatless meal a week. Besides the health benefits, this can also be incredibly cost-effective, as vegetarian meals are easy to connect into other dinners or use as a side for meat dishes later in the week. Lately we've been putting together one bean-based meal a week and then using the leftovers to come up with other lunches or dinners. Rather than buying canned beans, instead we buy bulk bagged beans and soak them ourselves, which is much cheaper.

One of our recent concoctions has been "Cuban style" black beans. To start out, the beans are soaked for around a full day in water, and the water is changed out every few hours. After soaking, we minced up onions, red and orange bell pepper, and garlic. The veggies are cooked first to soften up, and then everything is mixed together with the beans and water.

There are plenty of recipes that can be found online for this type of black bean mixture by just simply performing a Google search. We used standard seasonings like garlic and onion powder while the beans cooked, but at the end it still tasted like something was missing, so we deviated from the base recipe and added in cumin. While this left the Cuban flavor and went more Mexican, it definitely gave us the taste we were looking for.

Here are the finished beans, which are hearty enough to be eaten on their own like a bowl of chili, and the meat is barely even missed.

A plain bowl of beans is a bit too spartan for our tastes though, so we had to jazz it up with some extras. First we fried some cheap corn tortillas in a small amount of oil to make our own custom chips.

Since we make them ourselves, we have total control over the seasonings. We recommend garlic pepper, or garlic powder, pepper, and salt.

The fried tortillas can be used like a flat tostada with everything piled on top, but instead we broke ours up into a few large pieces to use as dipping implements.

To add in a few extras and turn this into more of a complete meal, next we put a dollop of sour cream and some chopped avocado.

Shredded cheese is of course a necessity, and there's plenty more tortillas in the background waiting to be used up.

There was far more beans and tortillas than we could eat in one sitting, so we interconnected our meals and re-used these ingredients again for both a lunch and a dinner. Here we've put the beans on top of some brown rice and we're having them with clearance enchiladas from the super market deli for a meal that's fast, cheap, and easy.

We had a very similar meal again a day later, taking one of those massive $1.25 beef burritos from the deli, cutting it in half, and then turning it into a sort of chimichanga by frying it on the stove. By planning ahead and buying a few cheap items from the store during the week, we stretched one meal into three and tried out a variety of interesting combinations we wouldn't have otherwise made.