The Recipe - Revised 2013

Nicaraguan Beans and Rice
Gallo Pinto
With cabbage and lime salad and sauteed bananas

As Jenny Sanchez, from Leon, Nicaragua, taught Lindsay Sterling in Freeport, Maine, 2009

"Gallo" means "rooster" in Spanish;"pinto" means "spotted." The rice and beans cooked this way look mottled like a rooster's feathers.

Total Time: 1 hr with pressure cooker, 3-4 hrs without
Serves 4-6

1/2 lb. dried pinto beans
1 cup white rice
1/2 tsp achiote powder
1/2 tsp ground coriander
2 cloves garlic
1/4 c. + 1 Tpsp. olive oil
1 ½ Tbsp green pepper, medium dice
1 ½ Tbsp red pepper, medium dice
½ small yellow onion, medium dice
½ tsp + 1/8 tsp salt
16 cilantro leaves
4 bananas or plantains
8 oz. sour cream
8 oz. salsa
1/2 small cabbage
2 tomatoes, large dice
1 1/3 limes
¼ cup cheddar cheese, in ½ inch cubes

Part 1: Ahead of time, cook rice and cook beans. 

The night before, rinse beans in cold water, spread out on a cookie sheet, and pick out any stones. In a large bowl cover beans by a couple inches in hot water. Let sit over night.

If you have a pressure cooker, put the beans in the pot covered by 2 inches of water. Add achiote, smashed garlic, ground coriander. Lock down pressure cooker lid (follow manufacturer's directions) and turn on high. Once pot is under pressure, turn heat to low, and the beans will take just 7 minutes to become soft, like cooked potato. Release pressure and strain beans.

If you don't have a pressure cooker, follow the same directions (minus locking down the lid and releasing pressure). It'll just take a lot longer to cook the beans until soft, more like 45min to 2 hours, depending on how old the beans are. Make sure to add water if you need to so the beans always stay submerged while cooking.

While beans are cooking, cook white rice separately. Put 2 cups water and 1 cup rice in a small pot. Bring to a boil, then turn to low, cover, and let cook for 20 minutes. Keep rice and strained beans covered separately in fridge if you'll be finishing the dish the next day.

Part 2: Start preparing the rest of the dish about an hour before serving.

Make the gallo pinto. In ¼ cup olive oil in large pan, saute yellow onion, red and green peppers until soft, mix in beans and let cook for 5 minutes on medium high, so beans are sizzling in the oil and beginning to brown. Turn over gently with spatula to brown the other sides of the beans. Once beans are slightly browned (10-20 minutes), scoot the beans into a ring around the outer edge of the pan so the center of the pan is empty. Pile the rice into the center. Sprinkle ½ tsp salt onto beans. Fold beans and rice together. Once rice is hot, add cilantro leaves, cover and turn off heat.

Sautee the bananas (or plantains). Peel bananas and slice each lengthwise, then across, so you have 2-3 inch segments each with a flat side. In 1 Tbsp olive oil in a large sautee pan on medium heat, saute bananas flipping once so both sides are golden brown.

Prepare the cabbage salad (while bananas are cooking). The lacy, crunchy texture of the cabbage dressed solely with fresh lime and salt is what makes this simple salad mind-bogglingly refreshing. To create it, try this knew way to cut cabbage. Slice off two inches from sphere. Hold the piece, inside up. Instead of slicing straight up and down, as you shave thin pieces off with a paring knife, flick your wrist as if you are drawing with the tip of the knife the letter “c” away from you. (Use only lacy thin shavings for salad, save any large thick pieces for some other purpose.) Pile cabbage on the top half of each serving plate, top with diced tomato, squeeze fresh lime all over (about 1/3 of a lime per person), and sprinkle more salt than seems sane.

Assemble the rest of the plates. Getting the rice and beans and the bananas onto the plate in a cool, appetizing way is like making a sand castle with small dishes as your moulds. Fill a 1 c. sized rounded dish or measuring cup with rice and beans and press down. Flip over onto the center of the plate. Now make two banana piles with a smaller dish in the same way on each side of the rice and beans. Below the row of rice and beans and bananas, put a generous dollop of sour cream and a couple spoonfuls of salsa. Sprinkle cubes of cheddar on top of the rice and beans.

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2013

Nicaraguan Gallo Pinto with cabbage & lime salad and sauteed bananas

I consider this a total and complete cure for Lunch Boredom Syndrome. It’s not a sandwich, wrap, panini, pizza, burrito, or taco. It’s special: a whole plate of food – with lots of surprise. Jenny Sanchez graced my life with this dish. She moved to the U.S. from Nicaragua 41 years ago, and just my luck, lives down the street.

Here’s the recipe.
And Jenny's story.

The Story

Nicaraguan Gallo Pinto

With crunchy cabbage & lime salad and sauteed bananas.

By Lindsay Sterling

If it weren’t for Nicaragua, Jenny Sanchez and her favorite dish, gallo pinto, wouldn’t be here. She’s a seventy-five-year-old grandmother. She’s short, has wavy dark hair, black eyes. She leans over slightly even when she’s standing upright and has a stiff, belabored walk. She lives alone in a neighborhood of single-floor apartments. I met her at a food pantry where she gets coffee. After working as an LVN nurse to support herself and her daughter, she is now retired, and her social security check doesn’t quite cover everything.

We’re in her dark, small kitchen, the curtains closed. Her apartment is simple, decorated with photos of her life as a young woman in Nicaragua and of her fully American daughter and granddaughters who now live in a house a couple towns over. As she squeezes limejuice over lacey thin ruffled cabbage, she tells me they don’t have lemons in Nicaragua because it’s too dry. And as she’s sauteeing bananas, she tells me she would use plantains in Nicaragua. “After the revolution, Sandinista destroy everything in my town. We have no good land for banana [anymore].”

Throughout our cooking session and talk over lunch, there is a lot of comparing here to there. “In Central America we don’t have cheese processed, we have from da cow.” At the market in Nicaragua, “everything is no pesticides. Naturelle.” In Nicaragua, grandparents live in the same house with their children and grandchildren. I ask if she’s upset she doesn’t live with her daughter and granddaughter. “I’m not upset,” she clarifies, “I’m here. I live the U.S. way. In Nicaragua, it wouldn’t be that way.”

But while she longs for Nicaraguan pesticide-free mamón (a small, red hairy fruit known elsewhere as rambutan), jocotes (they’re like plums), mango, and multi-generational households, Nicaragua wasn’t all love and organic-goes-without-saying. She left on a plane to California in 1968 because she feared that she would be killed by the Sandinistas, a revolutionary group. She worked as a military nurse for their enemy. She tried to get her parents to come to the United States with her. “Better leave before revolution beginning,” she explains. They stayed.

During the revolution, a helicopter landed on the roof of her parents’ house. She says, “He [my father] protecting my mother. Sandinistas in the house. They killing my parents. ‘We have to get our of here.’ They running no shoes on. My father inserted a big nail and got infection in feet because no hospitals, no doctors, no alcohol.” Her father lost his leg. Jenny sent blood from the United States. “He no die immediately. He die after that. Gangrene.” Eventually, she explains. “They [the Sandinistas] took the money, they took the house. My three neices, no shoes, no clothes...The new President, Ortega, was trying to finish the revolution with a big party. But they have no house, all burning, no food. Every two weeks they give my mother one chicken to feed four people. They were starving.” She sent money. She sent shoes.

It seems strange to me, how such a beautiful meal could arise out of all this. A particular method of pre-cooking rice and beans and then sauteeing them with oil, peppers and onions, persisted through the utter devastation of a country, through the burning of banana fields and houses, through 41 years of life in the U.S., through an alcoholic husband, through divorce, through being a working, single mother making something like eighteen dollars and hour, through living alone. I guess that’s part of the beauty of beautiful things. They find a way.

Jenny Sanchez in Maine 2009