28 July 2010

Fasule Melissa-Style

Albania lives in my heart for many a reason: my lovely friends, the crazy language, sufflaqes, and fasule. Fasule is simple and delicious. It's much more of a comfort food to me than Chicken Noodle Soup. Albanians are a very simple people so fasule meant boiled beans, an onion, some garlic and possibly some tomato sauce. Not much but it was super delicious.

Today I needed that comfort food. Even though the season wasn't calling for it at all. So after I spent hours pouring over my math book, I went home and decided to pull my albanian traditions out and make some fasule.

But what I ended up creating was 100,000 times better.
***
Fasule Melissa-Style

I took:

2 cans of Norther White Beans and put them in a pot with water to start boiling.

Off to the side in a frying pan, I took:

a delicious, almost excessive amount of Virgin Pressed Olive Oil,
1 jalapeno
1/4 of a White Onion
4 giant cloves of garlic
1 Roma tomato
3/4 of a zucchini
1 white Portobello mushroom
and a nice dosage of Garlic Pepper

and saute ed all of that for about 10 minutes. Softening the vegetables and getting all the juices flowing beautifully!

As I watched the concoction of vegetables saute into near perfection, I threw in some Chicken broth with the beans to give the fasule an extra touch of flavor as well as throwing in 1/3 of a can of Tomato paste; giving the fasule it's beautiful red coloring.

When the vegetables were gorgeous, I threw those into my beans, added 4 more spoons of Olive oil and a spoonful of Sour Cream (making it a tad bit creamy).

Then I covered that pan, set it to high and boiled it for 30 minutes; allowing, the steam to circulate throughout my kitchen, enveloping the apartment in a delicious aroma.

After that half hour, I opened up my lid to find the most beautiful orange-red colored, and hearty looking fasule ever. I instantly poured myself a bowl, sat down and ate.


The moment that spoon hit my mouth, I was in paradise. Life was good.
***

It was delicious.

***

**It had burned at the bottom a little bit but that just added a somewhat exotic smokey flavoring that made it that much better.

1 comment:

Mom said...

That sounds and looks Yummy!

Love the Yamagata.


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