marathoner452

Are YOU ready for a winter storm?

Yay for giving my first winter storm presentations to YMCA afte-school programs yesterday. It's good to be back in the swing of things. So that's 2 yesterday, 2 today and one tomorrow. After that, hopefully volunteers will start inundating me with offers to give presentations, thanks to the note Judy put in the latest emergency services newsletter. That'd be awesome. The more presentations I can get covered, the more of a chance I have of being able to be deployed to a disaster response operation sometime after the B & A 1/2 on March 5th.

In other news, I made a huge batch of my favorite brought-from-home lunch yesterday-creole red beans and rice. We seem to go through a lot of chili powder and cumin and onions in my house...wonder why? Now let's see if I have that recipe memorized...test time!

4 ½ cups of cooked white rice
3 T. olive oil
1 large onion
2 stalks of celery, chopped
½ c. green pepper, chopped
1 T. chili powder, at the very least
1 t. thyme
½ T. cumin, at the very least
2 15-ounce cans of red kidney beans, drained (I like to use both light and dark for more color)

Prepare the white rice ahead of time.

Cook the onion, celery and green pepper in the olive oil for awhile, between 5-10 minutes on moderate heat. Add the spices and mix well, leaving the veggie-spice mixture on the heat. Add kidney beans, mix well so the spices are evenly mixed.

Remove from heat and mix very well in a large bowl. Be sure to break up all the clumps of rice. Serve fresh or divide into portions and reheat later.

Supposedly makes 8 servings, but for me the distance runner it makes about 4.