I’m often asked what type of Thanksgiving my family and I have. The question arises from the fact that people know I’m Puerto Rican and that I don’t always eat dishes common to the American culture.

For example, my co-workers were recently very surprised to learn that I have never eaten green bean casserole. It’s not a dish that my family even knows how to make. Naturally, the next questions are, “What kind of food do you serve? Do you have rice and beans? Do you even make a turkey?” The answers to those questions are: 1) We serve a variety of dishes; 2) Yes, definitely rice and sometimes beans; and 3) Yes, we have turkey.

As I’m sure is true in your families, every household does things a little different. Side dishes vary. Desserts and appetizers vary. Such is the case in our culture and even within my immediate and extended family.

I decided to share with you the menu that I will be serving for Thanksgiving dinner, as a sample. It might help to put it all in perspective. Note that when my mami hosts Thanksgiving dinner, the menu slightly changes. The turkey, stuffing, and yellow rice remain, however. I have made notes next to each item to explain the dish and if there are any differences from what you might know it to be.

Puerto Rican Thanksgiving Dinner Menu Sample

1. Turkey - We season the turkey a bit differently using Adobo and Sazón as opposed to cloves, rosemary, etc. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we thaw the turkey and coat it well with a marinade of sazón, white vinegar, adobo, and meat tenderizer. After all parts of the turkey – inside, out, and under the skin – are coated, the turkey goes back in the fridge to marinate for the next two days.
2. Stuffing - My family’s turkey stuffing is meat-based (ground beef specifically) and then we add bread crumbs, potatoes, and carrots to it. Specifically, the night before Thanksgiving, we cook picadillo-ish ground beef and add the turkey gizzards and neck meat after having boiled them in salt water. On Thanksgiving, we boil some cube-sized potatoes, and mix them into the ground beef mixture along with bread crumbs. This then gets stuffed into the turkey.
3. Arroz con Vegetales – Translation is Rice with vegetables. This will be a yellow rice with some mixed vegetables (peas & carrots, corn, etc). Many households serve arroz con gandules or some other variation of yellow rice.
4. Sweet Potatoes – Standard sweet potatoes but instead of adding brown sugar or marshmallows and such, we just cut them up into thirds or quarters and boil them with salt. Sweet potatoes already have a great taste on their own.
5. Guineos en Escabeche – I see this being translated around the web as Green Banana Salad. I suppose that’s a fair translation. This picture and recipe from sazonboricua.com will help. The recipe is in Spanish, but here’s one in English from elboricua.com.
6. Macaroni Salad – Macaroni, shredded carrots, cut-up green olives, and mayonnaise.
7. Macaroni Pie - This dish is actually not Puerto Rican, but from Trinidad. It has been added to my menu in recent years because my husband is Trinidadian and I have begun to blend some of his traditions with mine so that our daughter can learn about both of her cultures. Macaroni pie is similar to macaroni and cheese, but slightly different. I’m unable to find the recipe I actually use, but this one uses the same ingredients. It just puts it all together in a different order.
8. Cranberry Sauce – Our house has always served it straight out of the can. Of course, I’ve been given some cranberry sauce recipes recently, but have yet to try them. The can just seems so easy.
9. Gravy - Growing up, my mom would just buy canned gravy to serve. However, I watch far too many cooking shows and learned how easy it is to make your own gravy. Now, if I’m hosting Thanksgiving dinner, I use the turkey drippings along with chicken broth and flour to make my own turkey gravy.
10. Pumpkin Cheesecake – This too is absolutely not a Puerto Rican dish. I found a recipe a few years ago from Kraft and it actually came out good on my first try, so it’s become part of my personal Thanksgiving now.

I hope that this peek into a Puerto Rican Thanksgiving dinner has helped you get a glimpse of our traditions. Remember, again, that not all Puerto Rican households are the same and many serve ham or pernil (roast pork shoulder) along with a turkey, while others don’t serve turkey at all. Everyone has their preference.

What does your family traditionally serve for Thanksgiving? I’d love to hear about any special dishes and/or traditions you and your family include as part of your Thanksgiving celebration.

I am very fond of rice. Fond doesn’t even cover it. I’m actually quite in love with rice. You ask me what the ultimate comfort food is and I’ll quickly tell you rice and beans. I grew up eating rice on a daily basis, practically. There were days my mami made vegetables (of the root kind) instead of rice. Or days she made spaghetti (though, even then she served it with white rice on the side, but that’s another story). But, overall, most days out of my childhood were spent eating rice for dinner. I’m sure if you ask most Puerto Ricans, they too will tell you that they have a special place in their hearts for arroz y habichuelas.

Rice can be served in so many different ways. You can have white rice alone, white rice with a variety of beans (served on top of the rice, not on the side), and yellow rice. Yellow rice is when you really get a variety since you can add just about anything into yellow rice: beans, vegetables, meat, etc. But, perhaps the most well-known Puerto Rican rice is arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas). Traditionally served for Noche Buena, arroz con gandules is also a big hit for a family get-together or just for your everyday weeknight dinner. (Side note: In Trinidad, where my husband is from, they call it Rice and Peas. I’m lucky he loves it as much as I do.)

Being a busy working mom with not as much time to dedicate to cooking, I’m known for cooking Puerto Rican food in non-traditional ways and using shortcuts. See my post on planning a weekly dinner menu – using shortcuts. My number one favorite appliance in my house is my rice cooker. I must kiss the person who invented a rice cooker. It cooks my Puerto Rican rice just the same as my mom’s iron pot – well almost the same – unfortunately, it doesn’t make any pegao. But, otherwise, it tastes the same and requires a lot less maintenance to cook.

Photo by yasmapaz & ace_heart

How to Make Puerto Rican Arroz con Gandules in a Rice Cooker (Rice with Pigeon Peas)

Ingredients:

• Rice (about 1 handful per person) – Note that this is plain, non-instant white rice.
• Cooking Oil
• Sazón
• Tomato Sauce
• Tomato Paste
• Sofrito or Recaito
• Olives (use the Spanish salad olives with pimientos)
• 1 can of Gandules (Pigeon Peas)*

To see pictures and links for these ingredients, see 5 Must-Have Ingredients for Cooking Puerto Rican Food

Steps:

1. Put rice into your rice cooker’s pot and clean the rice. If you’re not familiar with how to clean rice, it just means that you run it under water a couple of times and pick out the dark grains, pebbles, etc. To do this:
   • Fill pot with water and press rice with your hands.
   • Pick out anything that’s not a rice grain.
   • Pour out water, being careful not to lose any of the rice.
   • Repeat a few times until water pours out clear.
2. Add water to the pot until the water sits just above the rice. (I’ve heard that normally it is a 2-1 ratio: for every cup of rice, you add 2 cups of water. I’ve never cooked it this way, as I don’t measure when I cook.)
3. Add a serving-spoon’s worth of cooking oil. Not a tablespoon, but the bigger spoon one uses to stir a pot.
4. Add 1 packet of sazón.
5. Add 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce.
6. Add 1 tablespoon of tomato paste.
7. Add 1 tablespoon of sofrito or recaito.
8. Add 5-6 olives with a teaspoon of the vinegar from the olives.
9. Add 1 can of washed and drained gandules.
10. Stir.
11. Taste the water. If you feel it needs more seasoning, you can add a little of either salt or Adobo to your liking.
12. Cover and set the rice cooker to cook.

There will be no need to stir the rice while it cooks, though you certainly can do so once about mid-way through. Your arroz should be done in about 30 minutes or so. You will know it’s done when you taste the rice and it’s neither mushy nor tough.

*The beauty of this recipe? You can swap out that can of gandules and make many other varieties of yellow rice.

• Rice with corn (arroz con maíz): Use 1 can of drained corn instead.
• Rice with beans (arroz con habichuelas): Use 1 can of washed and drained beans – any color.
• Rice with vegetables (arroz con vegetales): Use 1 can of drained mixed vegetables.
• Rice with chicken (arroz con pollo): Add cubed, cooked, grilled chicken. (Traditional arroz con pollo would use chicken on a bone and would cook the chicken first in the same pot before adding the rice and other ingredients. But, this will give you a decent version.)

I hope you enjoy this simple and easy recipe for traditional Puerto Rican rice using a rice cooker. I have found it to be much easier than cooking it in a regular pot and it tastes just the same. It allows for me to do other things (i.e., play with my daughter after work/school) without worrying about getting up every few minutes to stir and watch the rice.

Do you have a favorite shortcut for cooking rice? If you try this recipe, please come back and let us know how you liked it!

Disclosure: This post is part of a “I Heart Beef” campaign with TheMotherhood.com on behalf of The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. I will receive compensation for sharing my memories with you, but my opinions are mine. In fact, I have always loved beef.

We are what you would call meat lovers. That is to say that we could never be vegetarians. The word itself is one that would get you looks of “Are you crazy?” in our family. Now that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with being a vegetarian (Seinfeld anyone?), it’s just that we are carnivorous by nature.

Join me in a flashback real quick…

We had only been married a few months. Times were tough, of course, as is normal for a young couple just starting out. We were living off of rice, beans, and PB & J sandwiches. (How’s that for multicultural?) Since meat was the biggest expense on our grocery bill at the time, I began to make it last as long as I could. One day, after a tiring day at work, I came home and decided not to cook any meat that night. I remember my mami would sometimes make a great meal out of just yellow rice, beans, and a big salad. I opted to do the same.

A proud new wife, I set a plate of my home-cooked dinner in front of my husband and said “Buen provecho!” as I sat down across from him. He looked down at his plate, looked back up at me and said, “Where’s the meat?”

I can still remember that day. We laugh about it now, of course, but believe me that every meal since then has had some sort of meat in it. As I said…meat lovers.

Image from Wikipedia

And, though we’re equal opportunity meat lovers, this post will be all about the beef. We often ate beef growing up in a Puerto Rican house. From carne molida to bistec encebollado to barbecuing steaks at parties, many meals I grew up eating – and some of my favorites – involve beef. One of my all time favorites is bistec encebollado. I wish I had a nice video showing you how to make it, but I didn’t have time to make one right now (Note to self: Make video in the future!). So, I’m going to give you the basic recipe.

Image from CSU Meat Sciences

The key to making bistec encebollado is that you have to use cubed steak. If you can’t find it pre-packaged, just ask the butcher to run a piece of beef through the machine and it’ll come out cubed for you. Then, you really only need some onions and the basic ingredients for making sofrito – a staple when cooking Puerto Rican food.

Image from Puerto Rican Recipes Online

Recipe for Bistec Encebollado – Puerto Rican Cubed Steak with Onions

Ingredients

• Cubed Steak
• Onions
• Cooking Oil
• Adobo
• Meat Tenderizer
• Black Pepper

Cooking the Steak

1. Season el bistec with adobo, black pepper, and meat tenderizer.
2. Cut your onions into nice ring slices.
3. Using a large covered pan, heat a bit of cooking oil.
4. Put your steaks in and drizzle a little water under to help create steam.
5. Cover the pan and cook on low-medium heat.
6. When the steak is tender and nearly done, add your onions on top of the steaks.
7. The steak will cook slowly on low heat and the onions will wilt creating a perfect combination of steak and onions.
8. I highly suggest you serve over white rice and red beans with a side of tostones. Heaven!

I apologize for the lack in detail with the ingredients and the steps, but it is true to how I and everyone in my family cooks. We do not measure and just go along pouring items into the pot.

If you want to get some more ideas for cooking with beef, check out Beef It’s What’s for Dinner, which has many recipes, videos, and information for buying, cooking, and handling beef. February is actually “I Heart Beef” month so have fun looking up fun ideas for dinner this week; they even have a Quick Meals section with simple recipes fit for any busy parent.

Now, let’s get on to the contest.

Giveaway

One of you will win a $100 Omaha Steaks gift card!

How to Enter

If you’d like to enter this contest for a $100 Omaha Steaks gift card, simply leave a comment below and share your favorite memories of making everyday occasions special with beef and let me know your favorite recipe from the Beef It’s What’s for Dinner site.

For extra entries:

1. Tweet about this contest with a link back to this post and include @modernmami in your tweet. You must leave a separate comment with a link to your tweet for your entry to count.
2. Follow @BeefForDinner on twitter and tweet them with a recipe you like from their site.
3. Become a fan of ModernMami.com on Facebook and leave a comment with your Facebook name.
4. Become a fan of Beef It’s What’s for Dinner on Facebook.
5. Subscribe to this blog via email and leave a comment with the email you used to subscribe. (You can use the email field to do this instead of putting your email in the comment if you prefer.)
6. Subscribe on friendfeed and leave a comment with your friendfeed ID.
7. Write a blog post on your own blog sharing with your readers something you found helpful on the Beef It’s What’s for Dinner site. Make sure to link back to this contest page in your post. Leave a comment with your post link.

All entries must be in by Sunday, February 28 at 11:59 pm EST. Make sure to leave a separate comment for each entry. The winner will be chosen using Random.org and will be notified via email. (Please be sure to provide a valid email address with your entry.)

This month’s Potato Tastemaker 2K10 challenge was Nutrition on a Budget. I had to create a nutritious dish for 4 with only $10 – using potatoes of course!

First, a few facts about potatoes:

• one medium-size potato has just 110 calories and is absolutely fat free
• one potato provides 45% of your daily value of vitamin C
• when eaten with the skin, a potato has more potassium than a banana
• potatoes are often one of the best values in the produce department, costing (on average), just $.25 per pound

For more potato goodness, tips, and recipes, check out Mom’s Dinner Helper from the US Potato Board.

Now, watch and see what I created:

Make sure you click over to the ModernMami.com YouTube channel and rank the video. You’ll have to sign in, but it’s super easy and free to create a YouTube account if you don’t already have one.

Here’s how to rank the video:

• View the ModernMami #tastemaker challenge 2 video at YouTube. Just click that link to go there.
• Sign in with your YouTube account or Google account; either works.
• Click the stars under the video to rank it.

That’s it!

Make sure to spread the word to your friends!

Rank the video. Pretty please?

Thanks!!!

Don’t remember what I made for part 1 of the challenge? I showed you how to make rellenos de papa…with a salmon twist.

Disclosure: As a Potato Tastemaker challenger, for round 2 of the challenge, I was provided with $10 for creating my dish. Additionally, I received a few kitchen gadgets and a recipe book. No other compensation received.

You saw me open the box. Then, it was on to cooking.

This month’s Potato Tastemaker 2K10 challenge was honoring National Seafood Month. My task was to create a dish using potatoes and salmon.

Watch and see what I created:

I’ll probably post a full recipe in the future. For now, make sure you click over to the ModernMami.com YouTube channel and rank the video. Yes you have to sign in, but it’s super easy and free to create an account if you don’t already have one. And why don’t you, anyway?

Here’s how to rank the video:

• View the ModernMami #tastemaker challenge 1 video at YouTube. Just click that link to go there.
• Sign in with your YouTube account or Google account; either works.
• Click the stars under the video to rank it.

That’s it! Simple enough right?

Make sure to spread the word to your friends!

Now.go.rank.the.video.

There are some very essential ingredients when it comes to cooking Puerto Rican food. They make up what’s called sofrito.

Now…the term sofrito is used a bit interchangeably because it refers to both the overall mixture of these ingredients as well as a specific item.

Either way, we use sofrito (the overall mixture) for just about everything we cook. It’s used in yellow rice, beans, stews, soups, and pretty much anything that is cooked in a sauce.

It’s a staple.

5 Ingredients for Cooking Puerto Rican Style

Sofrito or Recaito

Like I said, sofrito can also be a specific item. Many people make their own sofrito by blending various peppers and herbs in a food processor. However, us modern mamis buy the bottled or frozen version. Goya sofrito comes in both. At least in the supermarket.

Sometimes I buy recaito instead of sofrito. It’s basically the same thing and many of the ingredients overlap. They serve the same purpose. Again, Goya recaito comes both in a bottle and frozen.

Sazon

Sazon is a blend of different seasonings and spices and also has achiote in it. Achiote (or annatto) is what gives our food the orange-y color. Sometimes half a packet is all you need.

Adobo

Adobo replaces the salt and pepper combo in a Puerto Rican kitchen. We do not season our meats with salt and pepper. Instead, we use adobo. And, please for the love of all that is right, DO season BOTH sides of the meat. I can’t for the life of me understand why you would want to eat meat that tastes good on one side only.

Tomato Sauce & Tomato Paste

Tomato sauce adds some more coloring and gives a great flavoring to the gravy/sauce. It also helps to give texture, along with…

Tomato paste goes right along with tomato sauce. You can’t really have one without the other (which is why together they count as one item). The tomato paste definitely adds a thicker consistency to the sauce.

Green Olives

I was told by a former co-worker once that she loves to eat olives, but would have never thought to cook with them. Just a couple of olives in the rice or beans adds a great flavor.

And there you have it. Five ingredients that are used in everyday Puerto Rican cooking and make-up our base seasoning for nearly all dishes.

*Please note that you don’t have to get Goya; there are other brands out there. I just couldn’t find them to showcase.*

Have you ever had or cooked any Puerto Rican dishes? Which are your favorite(s)?

P.S. Don’t forget today is also Family Eden Wednesday! Help me figure out how to use my slow cooker!

All images from Amazon.com.

Before I sign off for the holidays, I couldn’t leave without sharing the recipe for coquito (let’s call it a Puerto Rican version of eggnog – but better! lol).

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Coquito – from http://www.elboricua.com/coquito.html

30 ounces coconut milk
14 ounces condensed milk
1 cup Bacardi rum
½ cup water
pinch of salt
½ tsp. cinnamon

Mix all ingredients in the blender. Taste and [add] more rum if you like it stronger. You need to add the water because it will get thicker later in the fridge. Pour into a bottle and refrigerate well. Make ahead for richer flavor. Serve in small glassware.
************************************************************************************

You can also read up on the traditions of a Puerto Rican Christmas and another great dish – pasteles.

My baby girl had her first pastel earlier this month when we had the all day cooking fest.

I’m not sure if she liked it, but she ate some of it, actually, most of it got on her clothes, but such is toddler feeding.

Anyway, FELIZ NAVIDAD!