Rice and Red Beans With Coconut Milk, Chile and Garlic

just made this for the first time. its an easy dish to bring to the table with minimal effort and pantry ingredients. seems relatively healthy and its satisfying. the recipe itself is a little loose with the details, specifically how much water to add and whether or not to cover the pot. I covered the pot because I was worried it would dry out, but after 20 minutes it was essentially a soup. luckily, the rice wasn't fully cooked yet, so i roasted another 10 minutes with the lid off and it worked

This dish is a nice riff on beans and rice. The coconut flavor is pretty strong, so I put d’ lime in d’ coconut as an improvement. I used white short grain rice without par boiling. The recipe is missing the instruction to bring the final mixture (beans, rice, coconut, water, etc.) back to a boil on the cook top to make the oven cooking time less. I agree with those who thought the ratio of rice to beans should be more 1:1. One way to achieve this is to add the full amount of beans and then smash some others to add to the pot. Although, the smashing seems unnecessary in a dish that doesn’t in the end contain liquid. I’ll make it again, but probably with canned beans instead of dried beans that I cooked earlier that day—the dish doesn’t reward that extra effort, but it is good if you like this kind of thing.

Not a keeper. First of all, the result using brown rice was the most unappetizing grayish tan color, not even remotely like the photo. Second, the flavor was blah, and too sweet. And the yucky color makes it seem worse. Why parboil the rice? An unnecessary step imo. And black rice being so pricey, why use that, except maybe to improve the color of the final dish? And lastly, did I mention the gross color?