Easy Spaghetti

This dish is an old go to, so old I had to make it to remind myself of what usually goes in. (Being on autopilot can be a wonderful thing at times!) It's a delightfully easy way to make a meal fairly quickly, and has been a staple for me most of the places I've lived. It can be made vegetarian/vegan easily, or beefed up (literally) as fancy takes one.

Simplified Haitian Rice 'n Beans

Growing up with a parent who had spent a good part of her early adult life in Haiti I of course grew up eating pumpkin soup around New Year's Day and Haitian-style rice and beans. Both are fantastic meals, but rice and beans in particular I've rarely made because of how long they take, especially since moving to the PRC and being reduced to using one hot plate. (Overnight - or over-flight rather! - meals requiring more than one burner to make became time-consuming pains in the butt.) So I'm not sure why it took me so long to realize that I could probably make a modified rice and beans in my rice cooker! I finally had a light bulb moment today though, and what follows is how I went about bringing this great meal back into my life!

Crock-pot Jamaican Red Bean Soup

Birhane Silase Marley, Rastafarianism, and Ethiopian Orthodoxy have come up a couple of times in the last week, so I thought it would be appropriate to make something from Jamaica for dinner this week! I found this recipe intriguing as it combined a few things I'm not sure I would've mixed on my own, and I'm quite pleased by how it turned out! What follows is my modification of this recipe, which didn't require much tweaking to make it crockpoty awesomeness.