I’m stashing this here because I’m terrible about improvising on recipes, nailing one, and then not having any record of it later for reproduction (look, my brother’s the scientist in the family, my strength is logic, not careful replicable procedures (although I’m working on that with this weekend’s ReimageFest(tm))) (also, I’m the one in the family who’s comfortable with Lisps, as you might well glean from my rampant use of parentheses)

But tonight we’re making a variant of our beloved Belizean stew chicken with fried plantains, rice & beans, and coleslaw and I wanted to learn from my mistakes/victories. Here are the base recipes:

I’m futzing with them in the following ways:

  • 1/2 the amount of chicken in the recipe, but full amount of spices & vegetables. (Probably twice the cumin, tbh. Also, using achiote roja instead of recado because we’re out of the latter).
  • used white vinegar, not lemon juice.
  • adding the optional green pepper and a tomato (technically two seeded roma tomatoes but that’s roughly the size of a normal tomato). The jury is out on the cilantro and brown sugar. Cilantro doesn’t scream ‘belize’ to me.
  • roughly 3 cups of water to cover the chicken etc.
  • I totally don’t understand the “Heat the oil in a heavy pan or deep skillet and sprinkle flour, stirring to dissolve (like a thin roux) before adding chicken pieces.” No oil was specified in the ingredient list, nor flour. I winged (ha) it with about 2mm of grapeseed oil to cover the bottom of the pan (quite a wide pan – ~14″ diameter?) and ~3 tsp/1Tbsp flour.
  • oh, and I had it on medium-high heat. Also not specified 🙂
  • For the beans, we cheated on the soak time b/c we’re using an electric pressure cooker (hi, Instant Pot!). We got some small red beans (supposedly Chilean (I’m really annoyed that I didn’t make room in my suitcase to bring back the “Central American Red Beans” that I bought in NYC – surely those were the exact right ones! (GOYA brand, in case you care))) and soaked them for 3.5 hours.
  • We’re making 1/2 the recipe of this as well, so 1/2 lb beans & ~2.5 cups water (I used the soaking water because I’ve heard that helps with… um… digestion).
  • 1 onion, 3 cloves garlic, the soaked beans, the 2.5 c soaking water into the Instant Pot & set to ‘beans/chili’ for 10 minutes and then natural pressure release. Research suggested 8-9 minutes for beans soaked overnight & ~25 min for dry beans. No one is very clear on how much water so I winged that as well. If the beans aren’t done when the cooker is done, we can throw ’em back in before adding the rice.
  • We actually bought ‘normal rice’ for this! (My understanding is that normal rice is long grain white rice. YMMV. We have about a dozen different kinds of rice in the house but that was not one of them.) Plan is to halve that as well, which should be about 2 cups, but I’ll check the ratio of beans:rice when adding it before re-cooking on ‘rice’ setting.

Update: the beans lie like a rug. 10 min at pressure was not even close. 10 MORE minutes still wasn’t done! (although I may have needed to add more water that I didn’t. Fine. FINE. Added another cup+ of water & back in for another 10 minutes. Still waiting to add the rice. Apparently we’re eating at midnight.)

Chicken update: very flavourless – added all the rest of the achiote roja we had (which, to be fair, was probably stale & had suffered a loss of potency.) Finally, between adding that (about 6x the suggested amount of recado), about 1 Tbsp of Frank’s Red Hot sauce (because we’re almost out of Marie Sharp’s), and about 4 Tbsp of Worcestershire sauce and taking the lid off, we have something that is still basically flavourless to me but Bill says is really good (the peril of being the chef is that spending so much time among the odours means that you become desensitized and can’t necessarily judge the taste properly). So, original recipe, quintuple the spices, add Worcestershire & hot sauce, and we’re good, apparently.

Addendum: We’re also having cole slaw & fried plantains. Bill is a staunch advocate of plain mayonnaise (rather than Miracle Whip, which I prefer) so we based the recipe for cole slaw around that. Turns out that “salad cream” is what we really want (which is apparently better approximated by Miracle Whip than mayo, so there!) so we had to improvise. “Steve” suggests this approximation & although we don’t have any icing sugar, we made do with cane sugar. We shredded cabbage & carrots for the cole slaw & nothing else. The plantains are just plantains, fried in butter. Some things are best in simplicity.