2 lbs. cubed Stew Meat
4 to 6  Potatoes, cubed
3 to 4  Carrots chopped 
1 tsp  Salt
¼ cup Cooking Wine (optional-it’s still great without it)

2 cups of broccoli florets- if you happen to have some around
Make sofrito: chop onion, garlic and pepper finely. Sautee in olive oil on medium high, for 3 to 4 minutes. 
Add the meat and brown it for about 5 minutes.

Cube potatoes, cut carrots in large round pieces.

Add the tomato sauce, potatoes, carrots, salt, and cooking wine to the meat, (broccoli too, if you are including it). Turn temperature down to medium-low, cover, and cook for 45 minutes.
Serve with rice and a salad.

This is the King of Bean Soups and about as Cuban as you can get. I can't imagine any Cuban get together that doesn't involve food, and specifically Black Beans and rice as a featured complement to the main course. Many people think of beans as healthy, sensible, inexpensive, something you make to stretch your food budget. This bean soup is all that, but it is also delicious and an exotic experience for your taste buds. Picture yourself on a veranda, feeling the tropical breeze, eating these wonderful beans!

There are a many versions of this recipe, none as good as my mother's. Mamina made this for every family gathering, now it's my turn to continue this delicious tradition.

FRIJOLES NEGROS-Black Bean Soup


1 lb bag (2 cups) dry black beans (you can use canned beans and add the sofrito, but it won’t be as good)

3-4 bay leaves
2 teaspoons salt



Sofrito:

3-4 Tablespoons of olive oil

1 large green bell pepper

1 large onion

4-5 garlic cloves


1 teaspoon oregano

1 teaspoon cumin

2 teaspoon sugar

1 Tablespoon of vinegar
1 Tablespoon of olive oil



Sort through the beans to take out any debris. Rinse and then cover them with water and soak overnight. Cook in soaking water, do not change it, so they don't loose any of their beautiful inky blackness. Add more water if needed, to about 2 inches above the beans, add the bay leaves.

If using a pressure cooker, cook 20- 25 minutes after pressure is reached. Otherwise use a heavy pan, bring the beans to a boil, then lower the temperature to low and cover them. Cook them for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until the beans are soft; if they dry out you can add more water. I like to set them at the back of the stove and forget about them. Don't worry, the aroma will remind you that they are cooking.

You can also cook them on high in a slow cooker for 7-8 hours. This actually works quite well. Then proceed with sofrito, etc.

Add the tablespoon of salt after they are soft, if you add it before cooking, the beans will be tough.

SOFRITO

While the beans are cooking, chop up pepper and onion. My mother stressed that the secret to her marvelous black beans was lots of green pepper. Sauté in olive oil, be generous with the oil for this one. Cook until the onions are translucent. Mash or mince the garlic and add to the sofrito, continue cooking for another minute or so.

When the beans are soft add the Sofrito to them, also the oregano, cumin and sugar. Stir and cook on low, covered, for about 20 more minutes. It will thicken a bit and all the flavors will blend. Taste it and add more salt if needed. Some people like to take out a cup of the beans, mash them and add them back to the soup to thicken it.

The last 2 ingredients, vinegar and olive oil, are for drizzling over the beans before serving. My mother would invariably tell me “most people add vinegar and oil to their black beans”, but she rarely did, as the kids would complain. I also skip the vinegar and oil as they are delicious either way. I say try it without and then if you want to, try adding the vinegar and oil, see what you think.

Serve over white rice or add the rice to your soup bowl. If they are not too thick, you can also eat them as a soup, with crusty Cuban bread.

Family & Friends in front of my grandparents home in Tuinucú

My mother expressed her love very successfully through the food she prepared. My father loved soups, especially bean soups. He didn’t think a meal was complete without soup, so Mamina made some sort of soup almost every day of her adult life.

My memories of soups begin in my grandmother’s kitchen. We lived with my father's parents until I was five years old, because my father helped run Abuelo Beluco's dairy and sugar cane plantation. The wood burning fireplace (hearth?) took up a whole wall of the large kitchen. Abuelo and my father got up at 3 AM to milk the cows, then lit the fire to boil the milk for breakfast. After that the cooking went on all day. Abuela Natalia, my grandmother, had a cook and other servants, but there was no question she directed all that went on in their home, especially in the kitchen. They prepared almuerzo (lunch) each day, for all the men working on the plantation. Those meals for 20-30 people always started with a hearty bean soup.

I was rarely allowed in that kitchen, I was a little child and I guess it was dangerous. Plus with all the activity I would have gotten in the way, but I remember the heat and the smoke and the wonderful smells! In the afternoons my grandmother sat at the table and sorted through the beans that would be left soaking for the next day's soup. It was a good time to talk with her.

The picture above is my grandparents home in Tuinucu, Cuba. Family and friends on the steps.

Several of you have asked how to cook dry beans, so I'm posting general instructions before I post specific recipes in the weeks to come. You might want to save this, to refer back to.

GENERAL DIRECTIONS FOR COOKING LEGUMES (BEANS, LENTILS, ETC)

Sort through the dry beans or peas the day before you plan to cook them, to take out any rocks or debris, etc. Most packaged beans come pretty clean, but old customs die hard so Mamina always did this. Rinse the beans, you can use a colander, or just put water in a pan with the beans and try to pour it out without spilling all the beans :), then cover with cold water and soak over night or for at least 4 hours. My mother always cooked beans in the same water she soaked them in, I don’t. Come morning I drain the beans and add new water to cook them in. I read somewhere that this way you get rid of some of the starch that causes gas when you eat the beans. The exception is when you are making black beans, if you drain the soaking water you will loose all the nice color, so cook them in the water you soaked them in.

It’s not imperative to soak lentils and split peas, but it doesn’t hurt either. Lentils kind of sprout when you soak them overnight, and that increases their nutritional value.

A pressure cooker makes cooking beans a half hour process. Make sure the beans are well covered with water, at least 2-3 inches above the beans. Cover the pressure cooker, put the steam valve on, cook on high heat until the valve is dancing and you know the pressure cooker has reached full pressure. Begin timing.

Lentils and split peas will be done in 15 minutes
Beans 20-25
Garbanzos (chick peas) 25-30

Be careful opening the pressure cooker. You must let all the pressure and steam dissipate, which takes about 10 minutes if you just let it sit. The food will continue to cook for at least the first 5 minutes, so count this as part of the cooking time. You can put the pressure cooker under running water to speed up the process and stop the cooking. You will hear the steam escape. Then you can remove the valve and open the lid. If it’s hard to open wait longer. Play it safe.

If you don’t have a pressure cooker, it’s best to use a heavy pan, so the beans wont burn or stick. Bring to a boil then simmer on med/low for a couple of hours. Best to cover the pan so they don’t loose as much water. You will probably have to add water, or start with 2-3 inches of water above the beans. Lentils and split peas should be soft in less than an hour. Other beans will take 2-3 hours, depending how soft you like them. Test the softness by smashing a bean between your fingers. Should be easy to smash. I actually think the beans cooked slowly, without the pressure cooker, taste better.

You can also cook beans in a slow cooker, on high heat, they will be soft in 7-8 hours.

Do not add salt at the beginning of cooking, it will toughen the beans. Wait until they are soft, when you add the sofrito.

A great many of the delicious foods that came out of Mamina’s kitchen began with a sofrito. It is the seasoning base for many Cuban dishes. Sofrito is sauted onions, peppers, garlic and sometimes tomatoes.

I love to eat sofrito on crackers, sprinkled with a little salt. I remember as a child, I would be busy playing and in the back of my mind, I would be paying attention to when the smell of the sofrito reached its crescendo. I became quite adept at getting to the kitchen at that crucial moment when the flavors peaked. Too often, though, I would be unwilling to interrupt my games and by the time I got to the kitchen, I had missed it by just a few seconds, such disappointment. The sofrito was gone into the soup! What a waste, I thought at the time.

After my parents came to live with us, my mother loved to make her delicious food for my children. This got her started using a small food processor for making sofrito. She chopped things quite finely because at least one of my sons would not eat anything that had onions in it, if he could recognize them, and it is not Cuban food without onions. I like the texture of onions so I don’t chop so finely, and since I’m not his grandmother I don’t have to cater to that finicky son.

Sometimes in her later years Mamina would separate a little bit of sofrito on a plate for me. By the time I got to it the sofrito would be cold and not quite as yummy as when you get it out of the frying pan during that brief moment of extraordinary flavor. However, I knew she had thought of me, and I felt loved.

To make a basic sofrito, sautée onions, garlic and green peppers in olive oil. The gentle heat persuades them to release their amazing flavors, and when you mix the sofrito into the soup, rice, chicken, etc. the result is a flavor you can’t accomplish with dry spices. Some ingredients increase, decrease or disappear altogether, depending on what the sofrito is meant to flavor, (I will note this when necessary) but this is the basic recipe:

Olive oil to generously coat frying pan
1 onion
1/2 to 1 green bell pepper
3-5 garlic cloves
1 8 oz can of tomato sauce
(You can use fresh tomatoes, but she rarely did.)

Chop the onion, pepper and garlic large or fine, depending on your family’s preference. Sauté vegetables gently in the olive oil over medium heat. When the onions are translucent, add tomato sauce and cook the ingredients on low for a couple of more minutes to blend the flavors. At this point, you can add other things to the sofrito. For example, if you are making sofrito to use in Fricasé, you would add the chicken and potatoes to the sofrito. Otherwise, you can add the sofrito to something else, like beans that have been cooked until soft.

I also love sofrito because it is such a nice simple recipe that can be repeated or modified to bring great results. Just a few steps, a simple thing really, and it makes everything better.

I was trying to think of an acronym to help my children remember what goes into a sofrito. My daughter in law Tara came up with GO GO (garlic, olive oil, green peppers, onions). I guess that could work, since we came to the US in the late 60’s, when there was “go go dancing”, “go go boots” etc, but here is another idea. Just think of OPTIMISM and GRATITUDE, doubled. Two things that always make things better are OPTIMISM and GRATITUDE, especially if you add a little tomato sauce!

It was many years after we left Cuba before I wanted to eat split pea soup, even though my mother’s split pea soup is delicious.

Cuba is a tropical country where things grow freely, but the communist controls greatly limited the food available. Everything had been rationed since Fidel Castro took power, and the grocery stores quite often had nothing at all. Even if something was allowed on your ration card, you could only buy what they had at the store. My mother stood in line for hours hoping to buy some food, a pair of shoes, anything.

For a VERY long time, (it seemed like years to my sisters and me) chicharos (split peas) were the only thing she could buy, but there was no ham or chorizo available with which to flavor the soup.
Mamina continued buying and making the chicharos because she knew they had a lot of nutritional value. It seemed that we ate chicharos for every meal for weeks on end. Mamina used whatever she could from our vegetable patch to flavor them, but often they seemed just a tasteless green mash. My sisters and I grew very tired of split pea and dreaded meal time.
Mamina would set out bowls of soup for my sisters, and me. She spoon fed our baby sister, Nina, and at times when my sister Isis and I complained more than we ate, she would reach over and put a spoonful of soup in our mouths also.

During this time my father was in a labor camp, for the crime of wanting to leave the country. Alone, and with few provisions, as my mother struggled to care for us, she was struck with inspiration. One day she went out to the back patio to do the wash and saw a cute little frog sitting by the door to the kitchen. My mother has always liked frogs, and this little frog by the kitchen door gave her an idea. She began to tell us wonderful stories about a crazy adventurous frog named Antoñica. who would overcome great odds with her daring and creativity. Antoñica helped us dream of freedom and possibilities. These exiting tales were reserved for mealtimes. We ate until our bowls were empty, distracted from the bland food by the flavor of Antoñica’s world and Mamina was comforted knowing her daughters were well nourished, and better prepared for the adventures and challenges ahead.



CHICHAROS – Split pea soup

1 lb bag (2 cups) split peas
2-3 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
3 carrots
1-2 cups calabaza, Cuban squash (optional)
A soup bone, a piece of ham or bacon, with lots of meat
1 Tablespoon salt

SOFRITO:
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil
½ green bell pepper
1 medium onion
4-5 garlic cloves
Chorizo (Spanish sausage – optional)
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce

Rinse peas, then cover with water and soak overnight. Next day pour out soaking water and add fresh water so it is about 2-3 inches above the peas; add potatoes, carrots and meat. If using a pressure cooker, cook 15 minutes after pressure is reached. However you don’t need a pressure cooker, they’ll do just fine in a heavy pan; cook covered on medium low heat for about 1 hour, till they are soft. Add more water as needed. Add a tablespoon of salt after the peas are soft.

Make Sofrito:
Chop pepper, onion, garlic and sauté in olive oil. When onions are translucent, add chorizo and tomato sauce and cook a few minutes longer, then add sofrito to peas. Stir and cook on low, covered, for about 10 more minutes. It will thicken a bit and all the flavors will blend. Taste to see if it has enough salt.