Author: Shane

Authentic Refried Beans

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The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.

The Reason:

I love Rick Bayless. I am on the record about this. As such, we own a well-worn copy of Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen. I’ve previously blogged a recipe from there, Tamal Azteca with Quick-Cooked Tomato-Chipotle Sauce.

So I think we originally just looked up this recipe as a generic side dish for mexican food, before realizing it’s so much more than that.

The Journey:

I’m known to eat a little bacon here and there. At some point, I realized there was no reason to throw away all that “liquid gold” bacon grease, and started saving it for cooking. The best use for bacon grease is refried beans, but it also works well for frying pancakes!

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This recipe is so simple, that I almost feel bad calling it a recipe. Beans, onions, garlic. What’s the big deal? Well, you eat it and you tell me.

frying onions

I never would have considered refried beans a health food, but making them from scratch like this, they’re not so bad. Beans, onions, garlic. (And a good thing too, since you’ll be wolfing them down by the spoonful!)

pinto beans

The Verdict:

If you have eaten at our house, there’s a good chance we have tried to feed these to you. I swear to you, I didn’t know that refried beans could possibly taste this good. It actually makes me sad that so many people will never experience how awesome these are, and just continue to think of refried beans as that brownish paste from a can that Taco Bell uses to glue the soft taco to the crunchy taco.

refried beans

The Recipe:

Recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen.

  • 2 Tablespoons bacon grease
  • 1 medium white onion, chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
  • 4 cups undrained, seasoned cooked beans
  • Salt
  1. Heat the bacon grease in a large pan.
  2. Add the onion and cook, stirring frequently, until deep golden, about 10 minutes
  3. Str in the garlic, cook for a minute or so.
  4. Add in about 1/4 of the beans, leaving most of the liquid behind.
  5. With a potato masher, mash the beans into a coarse puree. Add another portion of the beans, and mash. Continue until all the beans have been added.
  6. Add about a cup of bean liquid and stir frequently over the heat until the beans are still a little soupier than you’d like to serve them (they’ll thicken as they sit).
  7. Salt to taste.

Young Authors

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Evie and Ollie have been working on a secret project lately. Ollie dictates a story to Evie, who writes it down. This is something they came up with on their own, and nothing is more adorable then the two of them working on their book! This was all 100% no help from adults (including some very creative spelling). And it’s finally finished. I give you:

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“Once upon a time, and it started to rock, and it started to pop. It started to go up in the air. It was a…

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…alligator boost. Actually, it was a boat. A pig. And the pig jumped over a rainbow. The rainbow jumped over the pig. When the pig jumped over the rainbow, it touched the rainbow and the rainbow said, “Ow!” The…

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…rainbow decided to go back home. AND THEN the pig started to go back home. The alligator started to go back home. And then they[were] eating, so now it was night time. They were sleeping and then they woke up. And then they ate their breakfast. And then they ate…

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…supper. The trains started going on the train tracks. They jumped on the trains and then a spooky ghost jumped out at them. Boooooooooo. When they were riding on the car, they…

2014_03_28_9999_5…started to see what the farmers were doing. And then! Everything started to go back to the farm, then they started to eat the vegetables. The End.”

I Survived the Week!

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Last week the kids were on spring break. Coincidentally, Sara was gone to a conference all week, which left me minding the store while she was gone. I was a little nervous about this (a weekend of solo parenting sounds bad enough, but a whole week??), but actually it was totally easy breasy.

I think that 99% of the parenting induced stress in my life comes from having to get the kids to school on time. During spring break, with nowhere in particular to be, all of that come-on-kids-we-have-to-get-out-the-door stuff is just on the back burner. It also probably helps that, with no one to hang out with in the evening, I was pretty well rested (and a special thanks to my extremely early riser, who chose to occupy herself in the morning and let daddy sleep in).

We tried to make spring break something special, including a pajama party with friends (and pancakes for lunch!), a visit to daddy’s work (including a hike), a couple of play dates, a trip to a water park, and an “unplanned” visit to Aunt Rachael’s house.

I wanted the trip to be a surprise, so I didn’t mention it to the kids until it was time to leave. I just dropped it in casually: “Hey guys, you want to do something crazy? Let’s go visit Aunt Rachael!”

Evie was immediately suspicious.

“Did you call Aunt Rachael?”, “Does Mama know about this?”, and “You can’t just show up at someone’s house”. I don’t know how much of it is her personality and how much of it is her knowing *my* personality, but she just absolutely couldn’t believe that we were doing something spontaneous. As we were walking out the door, she said, “What day is it?” and then checked the calendar. “What does I-N-D-Y spell?” she asked.

She would seemingly forget about it for hours at a time, but you better believe she never stopped thinking about it for a second. As soon as we walked in the door: “Did you know we were coming? What does I-N-D-Y spell?” Everybody was playing along, but you simply cannot trick her. Rachael and I were putting away dishes in the kitchen and Rachael said, “When you called last night, I was…” and Evie immediately popped her head into the kitchen. “Daddy called last night, huh? I knew it!” Rachael had some snappy comeback like, “Did I say he called last night?”

While we were there, we had a cold and rainy trip to the zoo that was kind of awesome. We basically had the zoo to ourselves, and the animals were feeling particularly frisky. We had a lion roar at us, seals barking like mad, a walrus spitting fish skin at us (repeatedly), and we reported an umbrella in the cheetah enclosure and got to watch the zookeepers go in and get it with only sticks to protect themselves. We also got to pet some sharks, and even though I knew it had to be safe or else they wouldn’t let you do it, I still felt pretty nervous sticking my hand in there.

Unfortunately, I had a WICKED cold the entire time and felt absolutely miserable. On the other hand, it was much better to be sick at Rachael’s house where someone could occupy the kids then at home where I would have had to deal with them by myself while sick.

Despite all that, I managed to keep the house clean, and the dishes, laundry, and baking current, of which I was unreasonably smug.

So smug, in fact, that I wrote an entire blog post to brag about it.

Quote Monday plays word games

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Ollie: “Can we have a snack?”
Me: “Not right this second.”
Ollie: “Can we have a snack?”
Me: “Not right this second, Ollie.”
Ollie: “Well, it’s a different second.”

Ollie: “I’m firsty.”
Me: “Firsty?”
Ollie: “No, fffffffirsty.”
Me: “Do you mean thhhhhirsty?”
Ollie: “I’m drinkful.”

Ollie: “Pigs have a manny bank.”

::Drinking smoothies::
Ollie: “Shiver me timbers, I’m cold!”

Now that’s a sign of a kid who’s raised right.

Ollie and the Water Slide

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We recently bought a Groupon for a night at one of the indoor waterparks in Wisconsin (Timber Ridge). We’ve been meaning to check one of these places out as a sort of reward to Evie for doing so well at swim class, and Timber Ridge was sort of the perfect place for us.

I would say it is definitely geared towards a younger audience, which was just perfect. It was small enough that it wasn’t overwhelming, but big enough that we didn’t get bored. Sara and I would split up with the kids quite a bit, and it was never difficult to find each other. You can go to the water park before you check in and after you check out, so one night was really the most we needed to do. Any more than that and maybe we would have gotten bored with it. The room was perfect too, because it had a separate bedroom (so we didn’t have to go to bed when the kids went to bed) and a kitchen (so we could bring all of our food and not eat out the whole time).

Our kids are just not the kind of kids who like to jump in the water and splash. They are both pretty adverse to getting their faces wet. Thanks to swim class Evie has come a long way, but it’s just time to admit that she’s never going to be a water rat like me. So I kind of figured they’d stay in the kiddie area, maybe just sort of sit around. Like I said, they’re pretty calm in the water, and they especially don’t like to be around people who are splashing. Evie mostly just likes the lazy river. (“It’s so much calmer over here,” she confided with a sigh.)

Almost as soon as we stepped in the door Ollie pointed to the big green slide up near the ceiling and said, “I want to go on that.”

(Hard to see, but it’s the one on the right)

On one hand, I was thrilled. There is nothing I love more than a good waterslide, and it didn’t much seem like the kids were ever going to want to go to Noah’s Ark with me. On the other hand, I was a little nervous for him. This is a pretty big slide. Ollie’s such an easy going, shy little guy; neither of the kids are really risk takers. But he insisted, so up we went.

When we got to the top and I could see the first steep hill, I was saying things like, “Now buddy, remember that this might be a little scary, but everything’s okay and daddy will be with you…” I needn’t have worried. “Let’s do that again!” he said as soon as we got to the bottom.

This boy was relentless. Up and down, as fast as he could climb the stairs. Sara and I alternated with him, and we counted that he went 15 times the first day. That’s over 1,000 stairs! And he would have kept going too, even though he was so tired he could hardly walk.

Evie, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with the slide. Even Ollie having such a great time couldn’t convince her. Finally, Sara offered enough of a bribe to convince her (“You can stay up until 7:15 tonight!”) and she gave it a go.

She was shaking pretty bad when she got to the top of the slide but, to her credit, she didn’t say anything about it or try to back out at the last minute. And of course, after the first time she had the time of her life and insisted on going down as many times as Ollie after that. By the end she was even putting her hands up the whole time and asking the guy at the top to give us a push so we could go faster.

I only really have one complaint to level at Timber Ridge and that is there weren’t enough kiddie rafts. Some of the rafts had a seat in the front instead of a second hole, and with so many kids under 6 there, these rafts were worth more than gold. Ollie really couldn’t go down the slide without one, and sometimes we had to wait for a long, long time trying to get one of the few rafts with a seat. And once you did manage to land one you felt pretty bad since everybody kept asking you, “Are you still using that?” It all worked out in the end, but a significant portion of our day was spent in search of one of these rafts (we kept giving them up since so many people were trying to get one).

Anyway, we all had a great time. When we finally got ready to go home the next day, Ollie asked me, “Can we live here?”

I’ll call that a successful trip.