Feijoada

Here's the birthday dinner Jon made for me and it was great! Jon served a mission in Brazil, and this is the national dish of Brazil. Do we have a national dish in the U.S.A.? I wonder what it would be if we did...hot dogs? Maybe that should be the next vote on this blog. If you have any ideas what a good national dish should be for us and think its worthy of a vote, leave it in the comments here (if anybody else cares besides me.)

I searched the internet for Feijoada recipes and there are quite a few different ones out there, but they all have black beans, rice, and meat. Most of them use 2, 3, or even more kinds of meat (mostly different kinds of pork it seemed like.) So you could always use Jon's recipe and add more meat! Anyways, here is the recipe from Jon (he didn't really measure, and I like to know the precise measurements most of the time!) It's really pretty simple. We had it as leftovers, and I think it had even more flavor after sitting a day and being simmered again.

Feijoada

(You really can change the amounts of anything in here.)

Beans:

Soak 2 or 3 cups of black beans overnight, cook in crockpot all day (1 hr. on high, the rest on low) along with:

water

salt - 1 Tbsp, or less if that scares you (we used sea salt)

pepper
2 bay leaves (remove them when beans are done!)

garlic salt (I'm sure you could use minced garlic if you think its salty enough)

*We have used canned beans before and added garlic to them

Sausage:

Jon used 1 1/2 packages of smokehouse sausage

Slice the sausage into a bunch of circles (that's my wording!)

Fry sausage in pan with 1 onion (cut into whatever size pieces you like) and 1 or 2 cloves of minced garlic. The flavor is really good when you let the sausage get browned a little.

A couple of hours before the beans are done, add the the sausage, onions, and garlic mixture into the crockpot and let the flavors cook together for a while.

Serve over rice. There was a lot of juice on the beans that tasted really good over the rice. If you use canned beans, the juice is thicker.