 |
| Hearty
meal: After
a trying week, Djamila Dias, right, serves a bowl of her feijaoada to her aunt Beba at the end of the seven-day mourning period for Victoria Novick in Sao Vicente, Cape Verde. |
Feijoada
a moda de Djamila
(Djamila's Cape Verdean Bean Stew)
8
1/2 cups beans (I like black beans from Brazil but any dried bean will do.)
3
good-size pieces of chourico (preferably homemade and spicy)
1/2 lb. carrots
1/2
lb. tomatoes
1 lb. potatoes
1 onion
3 cloves of garlic
1 green pepper
1
16-oz container of salt-free chicken broth
1/2 lb. salt meat (in Portuguese
meat markets)
2 1/2 lbs. of cubed fresh meat
Bring a good sized pan of water to a boil and put in the dry beans. (If you soak the beans overnight, you lose the flavor.) When the beans are more or less cooked. -- take a bean from the water. If it's hard, it's not cooked enough, but be careful; if it's too soft, it's overdone and will turn into mush -- remove from the fire and drain off the water
Chop the onions and garlic and brown in a frying pan with olive oil. Add the meat, salt meat, chourico, potato and chicken broth. When they're all well cooked, mix with beans and continue cooking over a low fire until you have a great feijaoada, Total cooking time: about 3 hours.
Serves 20
Larry's note: Recipes are never exact but they work. There are always some extra ingredients (coriander and assorted spices which are added at just the right time). Some let the beans soak overnight, some don't. The ones who do say the ones who don't don't know what they're doing and vice versa. This was the best (version) I've ever had and all the ingedients are the same as everybody else's.
