oh..my..god.

so last night we had cuban pork roast and coconut rice with black beans and fried plantains. it was soo freaking awesome. the pork marinated all day and then roasted for nearly 2 hours. it was cooked just right, was so moist and succulent. the coconut rice was a great new flavor, too. it cooked pretty quickly, so if you need to let it simmer while preparing other dishes, you might add more than the 2 cups each coconut milk and water..i ended up adding water as necessary while i was waiting for everything else to finish up. the black beans were fabulous too. the recipe called for 4 cups dried beans, but i halved the recipe and used already-cooked beans. so i used two cans of black beans and then only 3 cups of chicken stock..perfect amounts :) the plantains turned out great too, david loved them but they were pretty sweet--a little too much for me to handle. everything was so perfectly seasoned and went great together. after we finished eating all we could say was, oh my god, how awesome was that!

last week we had my favorite, empanadas with raspberry coulis and refried pinto beans. for dessert we had fruit crisp with apples, strawberries, blueberries, and cranberries. we've been trying different ways to make the dish healthier, and david finally was able to omit the butter from the topping by using vanilla yogurt. we'd tried that before but this time it worked best. the filling, on the other hand, burned a bit. david learned ground ginger is not to be used in the same amounts as whole, fresh ginger. and that's all we'll say about that. :P






what's cookin' tonight: probably just the leftovers from last night (i have half a pork roast left), then a trip to the grocery store.