Thursday, January 17, 2008

Chipotle-Black Bean Burritos and Spanish Rice

Here's another one I found when I was looking for good vegetarian meals to make. I like black beans... I like burritos... so this recipe made sense to try. I picked up some Pace chipotle salsa from my grocery store to use for this recipe. I know bottled salsa is not that great, but I live in east Tennessee and I'm pretty sure I would not find good chipotle salsa anywhere (unless I made it myself, which I didn't have the time or the gumption to do). I thought the filling for these burritos was just ok. I am sure that it had to do with the quality of my salsa (the rest of the filling is black beans, corn, sauteed onions, and chili powder... what's not to like?). The avocado-salsa mixture was pretty good, but again, I think it would have been even better with a good fresh salsa. Well I don't think I'll make this one again unless I can get my hands on a good tasting chipotle salsa.

I also made a side of Spanish rice to go with the burritos. I found a recipe on the Simply Recipes blog - a site I've heard good things about, but I've never made anything from her blog. This was good, not amazing, but a good side dish. I used Better than Boullion instead of chicken stock, so that probably had something to do with it. I've never browned uncooked rice before (we Asians don't do fancy things to our rice like that), so that was an entirely new experience. Not life-changing or anything, but a little bit paradigm-shifting.

So... moral of the story? Use good ingredients. The end product will only be as good as your ingredients that you start with. The end.

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