South American Feijoada!

As you may have noticed other than on the rare occasion I don’t post many “normal” north american recipes. I try to show you dishes from other countries, or very unique (and sometimes unhealthy) strange recipes, and even some temple originals. I love foreign food or at least food that is foreign to me. I may be biased but I really think almost every other country than my own uses much more creativity and has a better sense of flavor and ingredient use. Prove me wrong if you can!

I find most “normal” dishes around here boring and to them I say …

In any case there are a LOT of countries I still have no idea what they’re eating but I’ve gotten a little education on the food of South America lately by the lovely Spica Suicide (who also runs the amazing site ai-candies.net ) who you may remember was one of our girls in the first season of the Temple of Evil / Suicide Girls Project. It turns out that there are many delicious dishes there from coconut custard delights called Quindim, to todays dish a super savory bean and many kinds of pork stew called Feijoada!

One of my friends absolutely hates beef for whatever reason so I did some looking around at South American Dishes and thought this was a good one to try that everyone could enjoy. Feijoada is the national dish of Brazil and was originally considered a poor person food (like lobsters were here!) but was so popular that it eventually got adopted! What a Cinderella story! It was invented by slaves of the colonists in these countries and is still going strong in many other countries where the colonists brought their slaves. Feijoada is basically a stew of a bunch of different things that at the time the masters didn’t want to eat. Today a whole other story! You’ll see what i mean when you go buy the chorizo!

Anyway let’s get to it!

1) Soak the black beans in water overnight or for at least 12 hours. This softens them up so they’ll be ready for the REAL cooking. I’ll bet this step will fuck you up since I put 3 hours cooking time! In any case all I could find around here is Black Turtle Beans which worked just fine and I found them at bulk barn. I’m not sure what the real black beans are called or where they come from.

2) Murderously chop up the onions, cilantro, green onions, tomatoes and garlic and cook them for about 5 minutes or until the onions are semi-transparent. Take them out of your pan.

3) Throw your chopped up tiny bacon pieces into the same pan and cook that til it’s almost done but NOT crispy! Take it out of the pan.

4) Toss into that pan with the bacon grease chopped up pieces of the Chorizo sausages and cook them about 5 minutes! Take it out of the pan.

5) Put the chopped up pork tenderloin in the SAME pan and cook it with the bacon and chorizo juices in there. Right about now you should be drooling or you’re doing it all wrong.

6) In a VERY LARGE POT saute all three meats and your veggies together for about 4 minutes.

7) Add the beans to the top and mix it all up very well! Toss in your chopped fresh coriander, and your bay leaves (I like to put them in a tea bag minus the tea so i can find them after).

8) Add enough boiling water to completely cover the beans and then turn your stove up to fucking flames of hell setting until it boils!

9) Once boiling turn the stove down to medium/medium-low, and add some salt and pepper if you like. Let it simmer covered for about 1.5 hours.

10) After 1.5 hours remove the cover and let the mixture bubble another 1.5 hours uncovered to get some of the liquid out and the taste condensed.

11) Serve your long awaited Feijoada over rice or eat it as it is!

12) Book your ticket to South America ’cause you’re going to want to try everything else there now!

Special thanks to Spica for the education and be sure to check out her site at http://ai-candies.com/