EASY Black Beans and Rice

I LOVE black beans and rice. To make them however, well, it can be a pain. After seeing Cooks Country do a version today (it looked wonderful but again, to time consuming for me) so I had an idea to transform it, change it around, make it my own...and what do ya know! It worked! (Can you hear the angels singing?)

So what do you need?
1/2 Bell Pepper
4 cloves of garlic
1/4 onion
(mince the above in a food processor until 1/4" or smaller but not paste like)
1 19-ish ounce can of black beans (drain but reserve the liquid, you will need it! You should have about 1 cup of the reserved liquid. If you don't then you will need to add enough water to get to that and if you have more use it and decrease your water if need be.)
2 cups rice (Thai Jasmine is my favorite but any long grain rice will work fine)
2 cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
1 strip pre-cooked bacon finely chopped
2 tsp hickory bacon salt (if you do not have bacon salt, first of all SHAME SHAME SHAME! Go to http://www.jdfoods.net/ and buy some!! If you can't do it then use 2 strips of pre-cooked bacon instead of one and add in 1 tsp salt. But seriously, go get yourself some Bacon Salt...that stuff is AWESOME in a jar!)

OK, you can do this in a pan or in your rice cooker. I have a good rice maker so I chose to do that. Once your veggies are minced heat your pan on medium (or turn on your rice cooker) and cook them for a few minutes in the olive oil until they are starting to soften. Add in your bacon and bacon salt and cook for a few more minutes until they look like this:

Yea, my rice pan is sadly beaten up...still cooks good though!

OK, now I want you to put in the beans, the reserved bean liquid and rice. Stir it up and let the rice soak up the bean liquid for a minute. This will add more flavor to the rice. After a minute go ahead and add in the water and cook away! If you have a rice cooker just tell it to cook, on the stove I would bring everything up to a simmer, cover and then cook on low. Either way, to prevent everything from burning stir it two or three times during the cooking process, likely 20 to 30 minutes. Once it's done remove the lid and give it one final stir. Let it rest for a couple of minutes before stirring.

The finished product!

Good stuff!