Casada - a Costa Rican Union of Fried Plantains, Volcano Rice, and Kidney Beans + Scott Pilgram

Casada was basically all I ate (read: could eat) for a week in Costa Rica with my roommate and her family and it is still in the top three of my list of Foods I Would Choose If Some Omnipotent Figure Forced Me To Only Eat One Thing For The Rest of My Life. So, um... yeah. It's good.

In some ways, you are forced to start this dinner an indeterminately long time in advance. Since we do not live in Costa Rica (well, I don't, maybe you do, in which case this recipe is pretty unnecessary to you), we do not have nice fresh plantains to pick off our trees. You can use bananas but I promise it won't be as good. Instead we get them picked when they are green and shipped here to ripen in their own good time, which can be anywhere from 1 week to 6 weeks. Seriously. I buy like 6 and keep them in a brown bag in the pantry and check on them periodically and then cook them when they look something like this, as the more yellow and brown they are, the sweeter and softer and less like a potato they taste.



So, basically, they rule my cooking schedule. These took 4 weeks to get this way, but the other 2 I bought them with were ready in one week. Ridiculous.

Anyway, now that you understand the mysterious nature of the plantain, I need to tell you that they are ridiculously delicious, even if you don't like bananas much, because they take everything bad about bananas and make it good (less intense smell, less slimy and gooey, you don't feel the banana fumes in your mouth when you eat plantains).

Okay, now how to cook them.

Actually you should start the rice first, especially if you have a rice cooker to keep it warm (have I convinced you you need one yet?) I used Volcano Rice that I bought at the Green Festival in SF. It is organic and delicious and can be bought here (http://www.lotusfoods.com). Really, all their rice is delicious, but I'm sure the rice you have in your pantry is very nice too. I didn't take a picture of it for some reason, but there's one at the end, so you'll just have to wait.

So now we can start the plantains. First, get a nice layer of oil in the bottom of a skillet and heat it up. While it's heating, slice your plantains up.



The oil took awhile so I made some iced tea too. Teavana's Jasmine Dragon Peals and Roobios Tropica are really good together. These companies should really be paying me for all this fabulous publicity.



So your oil is heated now and you can tell because you put your fingers under the faucet and flicked a few drops of water into the pan and it danced. So now you can place as many plantains as fit in the pan and let them cook (on medium heat, or low if necessary, you don't want it to get too hot or the pan will spit hot oil in your face). Let them cook for like 5 - 10 minutes, and check on them periodically. The bottom side should look like these guys in the back left:



When they look sorta like that you can flip them all over and cook the other side. Meanwhile, you can open a can or two of kidney beans and heat them up. (Or, if you are judging my use of canned beans, feel free to go back in time and make your own dried beans. I'm not that intense, sorry.)



Yum.

This dish is called casada because everything is mixed together. Like being married. So I hope you didn't divide each thing into a separate part of the plate, cause its supposed to look all good and mixed up, like this



I've recently begun reading the 6- volume Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley and enjoying them thoroughly. The humor is perfectly tailored to my weird tastes and the drawing is pretty fabulous too. Plus there is an impending movie with the inappropriately-cast Michael Cera, which otherwise looks pretty exciting. So check them out!