Rice and beans is a staple in every Haitian household. I’ve had different types from different cultures but I always come back to mine, its simply the best 🙂

What you will need:

1. a bag of goya dry red beans
2. a can of coconut milk
3. adobo (seriously every caribean person uses adobo)
4. scallions
5. parsly
6. thyme
7. onion
8. garlic
9. cooking butter (my family and I use cooking butter in everything 🙂
10. 3tbs of oil
11. Rice (we use basmati rice, by we i mean my family)
12. Habanero pepper

First steps: cooking the beans

1. In a pot dump washed beans add water 3 cups maybe? I don’t know we always eyeball things, add oil, garlic. It normally takes between an hour and 80 minutes for the beans to cooked fully, you want them cooked but not be too mushy.

Lets make rice and beans!

1. In the pot or another pot, start with nothing in it, add oil, scallions, chopped garlic, thyme, parsley, cooking butter and beans (just the beans not the broth) leave that for later and adobo (i dont know how much taste to see how much you need and add it gradually
2. The purpose of this is to let is the bean fry in all of the spices for 10 minutes, the smell is soo tempting!
3. Add the can of coconut milk and let simmer for 10 minutes
4. Next add the broth from the beans and the pepper and let boil
5. Wash rice when water starts to boil and not before you don’t want clumpy rice
6. Taste broth to make sure that it has enough salt, seasonings add more adobo if necessary and then add rice and cover.
7. Once broth is fully evaporated but rice is still undercooked cover with foil paper and lower heat.
8. To make sure that you have nicely cooked rice use the following proportions, 1 cup of rice =1.25 cup of water. Anther trick learned from my mom if your cooking spoon can stand in the pot after you poured the rice in you have enough if it falls you have too much water/broth in take some out.
9. Serve rice with meat, fish or chicken or with legume 🙂