Gallo Pinto

Another very good, ordinary day occurred today. I was up and at 'em at 9 AM, but my guest usually arises at about 6AM. She made my breakfast: Gallo Pinto, scrambled eggs, and pork sausage. Unless you're Hispanic or Latin, you may not be familiar with Gallo Pinto. It's basically black beans and rice and chopped onion cooked in oil and various seasonings.

One of those seasonings is Lizano Salsa, with which I was unfamiliar (other than hearing the name) but now I have a bottle in the cabinet above my kitchen stove. The Gallo Pinto was tasty and went well with scrambled eggs (though I understand that fried eggs are the more usual accompaniment). I want her to explain, slowly while I type, how she assembles the ingredients for this dish. In other words: her recipe. Yes, there are recipes on the Web—probably dozens of recipes. But I want the recipe I tasted.

Usually, when I want breakfast sausage, I defrost a couple of Jimmy Dean's pre-cooked sausage patties, but the real thing blows away Jimmy Dean's version. My guest cut them to about the size and thickness of biscuits, a manly sausage patty! Then there's taste. Not that Jimmy Dean's frozen, pre-cooked patties aren't good; they are. But they can't beat the real thing for taste. Frozen cooked sausage and a microwave oven are pure convenience, and there's nothing wrong with that, if that is what's most important to you.

After breakfast, I drove to Wally World and dropped off my guest. I went home and waited for her to text me to pick her up. The traffic in and around the Walmart parking lot was about as congested as it can get. Nevertheless, we got home unscathed and unpacked her purchases. They were mostly Christmas presents for her family in Central America. The things she bought would cost much more in her own country due to import duties. And some items here are simply not available in her country. Hence, the shopping trips.

Tonight, I "cooked" dinner: chili dogs with store-bought coleslaw and potato salad. The chili dogs were very good. Junk food usually is. Partly, it's because the food is jam-packed with sodium. It's also high in "bad" fats. When I say "bad" fats, think about it: would you rather eat bacon or olive oil? 

After dinner we sat beside the fireplace and watched the movie "10" from 1979. (It holds up—a mark of a good script.) Once again, the lights were low and the flames in the fireplace cast a comforting warmth over us. I could get used to this.