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Recipe: Brown Gack 6 February 2007 3:02 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, eating, eugene, recipes, restaurants, school, soup, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

So yesterday night, even though I was too tired to do anything but heat leftover soup for dinner, I started soaking some black beans with an eye towards Caribbean Black Beans with Sautéed Plantains from Jack Bishop’s A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen. (I am also very excited about North African Chickpea Soup with Harissa, all the recipes with caramelized onions, and really the whole Winter section because yay for eating seasonally, but I digress). If I can’t find plantains (and if the frustration doesn’t send me drooling over to Laughing Planet for their Che burrito, my usual source of plantain-y goodness), I might try the black bean enchiladas, but if I get lazier, my backup plan is an old standby: brown gack. Let me explain.

Once upon a time I used to be pretty obsessed with a website called Everything2, and this recipe borrows its name from a series of E2 food writeups on “vegetarian meals that are not just brown gack.” Unlike the dishes described in those writeups, the following is a shamelessly unglamorous one-pot stew of beans and rice, suitable for cooking in a rice cooker, as I frequently did back when I was living in dorm rooms, and my kitchen access was somewhat sporadic, to put it mildly. (Does it take a college education to become a professional cook? Maybe not, but getting sick of dining hall food was a powerful motivator for me to learn to cook in creative and improvisational ways just to avoid it. Kind of like this guy, only without the whole dead pig or snotty “I’m too good to work in a professional kitchen; that’s soooo low-class” attitude. You think maybe I’m a little defensive about those four very expensive years and all the ways in which they haven’t paid off so as to make the alumni magazine even remotely relevant to my life? Um, I digress.) Anyway, brown gack was born out of dorm room odds and ends, including leftover camping trip food, and although it’s no longer the staple fixture of my diet it once was, it’s still a fine burrito filling.

Ingredients and Equipment

What to Do

  1. Sauté the onion in just enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Season with a few shakes of chili powder. In college, my spice rack consisted of four flavors: black, white, green, and red — pepper, salt, generic mixed-herb Italian seasoning, and chili powder. Now that I’ve got a real spice rack, I might also add some cumin and/or cayenne at this point as well.
  2. When the onion is translucent, add the tomatoes and stir.
  3. Add the beans (if you’re using canned beans, I recommend giving them a rinse first).
  4. When the mix comes to a boil, stir in the rice. You may need to add a little water if you’re using real rice (not instant).
  5. When the rice is done, so is your gack.

Serve with grated cheese unless you’re vegan, in which case it will definitely need salt, and fresh salsa or hot sauce if you have it. As I mentioned before, brown gack is a good burrito filling: just wrap it in a warm tortilla with the garnishes of your choice and have at it. Other good ingredients to add during the initial onion and spices sauté include garlic, the previously mentioned cayenne and/or cumin, and diced bell peppers. Frozen sweet corn is a nice addition during the rice cooking phase, and adds a good color (but let’s face it, this stuff is never going to win any beauty contests, so it’s a good thing it smells and tastes great). Red beans can be used instead of black, but it does make the dish a little more monotonous-looking. A better choice is to double the recipe and use one can each of red and black beans (or half a cup of each, if you’re starting from dried beans).

Happy gacking!

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