black bean tacos

This is one of my college recipes–I ended up stretching my food budget pretty far by sticking to vegetarian meals. This is an interesting one, because it’s sort of a jumping-off point for a few more recipes; see the notes.

Ingredients

• 1 can black beans (1 cup prepared, 1/3-1/2 cup dried; you can do with more beans in this recipe, so err high)
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 bell pepper of your colour choice, diced
• ½ cup roasted corn, frozen (fresh, if you have it?) (Optional)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 Tbsp tomato paste
• 2 tsp cider vinegar
• 1½ Tbsp Adobo seasoning (cumin, coriander, dash of ground black pepper, some salt, oregano)
• ½ tsp ground chipotle pepper
• Sour cream and grated cheese for toppings
• 6 flour tortillas

Preparation

1. Wash and cut vegetables, then start heating oil in a chef’s pan or similar over medium heat. Once the oil’s shimmering hot, add the onions and sauté until translucent, before adding the carrot.
2. Once the onions are lightly browned and the carrot has picked up some colour, add the bell pepper. If you’re using other vegetables (see notes), now is a good time to add them. Sauté until peppers have softened and ideally caramelized a bit.
3. Add the garlic, spices, and tomato paste, then reduce temperature, deglaze with vinegar and add the beans with their liquor. Stir to combine, and bring the beans up to a simmer. At this point, if you need to, add some liquid; for this, I use vegetable broth–normally from concentrate, I don’t bother to keep stock on hand mostly.
4. (Optional) Once the beans are at a simmer, add the corn. It’ll be heated through by the time you serve the tacos.

Notes

Go wild on the added vegetables; personally, I’d focus on ingredients from the Americas here–squash would be the principal other addition I’d add. Leafy greens are a skip, though. You can shred them as a topping, but cooking them in won’t work well here. Mushrooms are another really good addition to make, to increase that meatiness.

This dish is, in some ways, a jumping-off point. This recipe specifically calls for flour tortillas, however it would also work over rice. Using smaller street taco style tortillas, this can be a side or part of a larger meal, whereas adding some eggs, either fried or cracked into and poached in the simmering beans, gets you something like huevos rancheros. Lastly, it could even probably be cooked down a little farther, formed, and fried to make fritters–maybe with some added corn starch or cornmeal; I haven’t tried this method yet.