Feijoada extravaganza!

When a recipe says it serves 8-10, usually I don't actually believe them but hte recipe I used to make my feijoada really did serve that many! (or would have had there been that many people. As it is, I have a fridge full of leftovers. Yum!)


First, I had to cut up a bunch of onion. I used whit instead of yellow because I already had some white lying around from other endeavors. Then I cut up a few strips of bacon and a ton of garlic. I sauteed these in a large pot for 10 minutes and then added cayenne pepper. The recipe called for an actual pepper to be ground, but I just used the bottled powder stuff.



Next, I chopped up all of the meat for my dish. I used pork loins and packaged corned beef lunch meat for my meat, even though the recipe calls for much more meat and more expensive meat. I feel that, even though I'm not following the recipe directly, I still have the spirit of feijoada since the dish was a combination of all of the cheap stuff that was available to the poor people of Brazil.



I then added all of the meat, beans and water to the sauteed mix and let it simmer.



And about three hours later.... ta-da! Feijoada.

I can see how this meal came to be. Poor Brazilians and the African slaves took everything they could get, including the cuts of meat others wouldn't eat and beans and rice, already a staple in their diet, and threw it together into something they could eat. This meal cooks without much supervision and feeds a lot of people!It makes sense that it has become a dish served all over the country. When people make this dish, they pay homage to those who created it out of necessity and carry on the tradition of using what is available.