Black Bean Tacos with Feta Cheese

This is one I adapted from Smitten Kitchen after I saw it the other day. The original recipe uses canned black beans, but I’ve got dry on hand, so I had to cook those first.* As a warning, I didn’t really measure anything in this recipe, so amounts are estimates.

black beans (8 oz. dry)
1-2 Tbsps. olive oil
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 Tbsp. diced jalapenos
handful of cherry tomatoes
flour tortillas
crumbled feta cheese

Put black beans and oil in a medium-sized sauce pan and cover with several inches of water. Bring to a rolling boil and keep it going until the beans are softened (roughly 1 hour). Stir occasionally and add water if necessary. By the time the beans are cooked, they will also have a sauce with them.

Salt and pepper the beans to taste, add cumin and lemon juice. Mix in diced jalapenos. Cut the tomatoes up and stir them in, too. Put a few tablespoons of filling in a tortilla along with a teaspoon or so of crumbled feta.

I chose to toast the tacos a couple at a time on my countertop grill until the feta melted, and I ate them with a spinach side salad. Very tasty.

* Cooking the beans myself gave me a nice sauce with them, but as a possible time-saving measure, I might recommend mixing 1 15-oz. can of black beans with a 10-oz. can of diced tomatoes and green chiles (a.k.a. Rotel) as a substitution for the jalapenos and tomatoes.

Sweet Potato souffle

2 medium-large sweet potatoes
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Cook the sweet potatoes (oven or microwave oven) then scoop out the insides and mix with the other ingredients before placing in a piepan.
Cook at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes (or until tilting the pan back and forth doesn’t remind you of jello). If you’re cooking in a deeper and less wide container
(sweet potato mixture is over 1.5 inches deep) reduce heat and increase cooking time.

Topping

butter
walnuts
brown sugar

Mix the ingrediants and top the sweet potato mixture after it has cooked, cooking for a further 10 minutes at 400 degrees.