 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to another episode of Long Live La Familia, the nutrition soap opera that speaks not only to our hearts, but also to our appetites. I'm Keri Bachman and I'm your host for the series. Today's episode is entitled, No I Nadai Nail Fridge, which translated means there's nothing in the refrigerator. The topic that we're going to be looking at is how to make quick meals from scratch when you don't have a lot of time. If you've been with us before, you'll remember the Sierra family. It's made up of the two grandparents and their six adult children. Now today's episode will be focusing on Lisa. Lisa is a single mom with two teenage daughters. She's really busy and has a lot going on in her life. Now as you know, our episodes are broken up into three segments. That gives us a chance to get back together after watching the episode a little bit. Think about what we've seen and apply it to our own lives. As usual, we're going to be making a recipe today. And so I want to go ahead and start by washing my hands. This is something you always want to do at home too. Especially important if you've got young children or older adults in your household. Everybody can get foodborne illness, but those groups are especially susceptible. What you want to do is soap up really well and rub for about 20 seconds, like I'm doing here, all parts of your hands. And then go ahead and, under running water, rinse off. Of course, we want to have our countertop clean too. And that I've already done. Okay, washed our hands. Now you will remember if you've seen our show before that the dialogue is a mix of English and Spanish. And don't worry if you don't speak any Spanish. You'll be able to understand everything that's happening. And if you're trying to learn some Spanish, pues mucho mejor. We're going to go ahead and talk a little bit about the recipe that we're making. It's a variation of the classic three-bean salad. And so I've already got three different types of beans in this dish here. What I've done is taken canned beans, drained off the liquid and poured the beans into here. So we have garbanzo beans, we have black eyed peas, and we have black beans. We're going to get back to this recipe a little bit later. Let's go ahead and watch the first segment of our episode. Silvia, turn down the radio. Pero me gusta la canción mentirosa muy. Girls, your sisters, why can't you get along? Yo nunca peleaba con mis hermanas. Ya, mom, but you're old. Yeja. Voy por el correo, you two get in the house. Silvia, help me with my book. Tengo mucho tarea. Homework, fine. Well, at least I do my homework, no que tú, tú nunca estudias. Well, I'm smarter than you, so I get my homework in the school. Que estudien los puros. Mentirosa, mentirosa. Con tu lengua venenosa. Un día you tell me something y mañana otra cosa. Anyways, what's in the fridge? Vengo, hombre. How about a break something, it really gets me hungry. Ya, es difícil que bailar. Anyways, maybe mom will let us order some pizza. Si, yo quiero comer pizza. Ay, colas, largas. How many times do I have to tell you to close the door when you come in? Lose something? You know what takes me a while to get the mail? No conozco a todos los vecinos todavía. We've got to be careful in this neighborhood. She did it. No, I didn't. You go behind me. You're the last one to open the door. Mama, ¿puedes buscar una pizza, por favor? ¿La reunión familiar? You girls know we have to save all we can for the family reunion. ¿Mirás tus villas? Telephone, electricity, mastercard? Look, mama, no hay nada. There's nothing in the fridge. Little chips. Are you guys using your breath? Si, todo necesita cocina. Something from these leftover beans. Alejandro, but you girls still need to help out. Pins de frijoles. Frijoles and beans. Now that you're working, it's all the same. Do you ever have that same feeling when you look at your cupboards that there's nothing to make? But think about it for a second. Lisa's refrigerator and cupboards had a fair amount of food in them. They were staples. And those are ingredients that can be used to make a variety of recipes. What was the main reason that Lisa gave for not wanting to go buy pizza? Well, she mentioned money, didn't she? Several times. And so we're gonna start a list here about why it makes sense to eat in. The first thing that we'll mention here is money. You save a lot when you buy the ingredients at the store and prepare foods yourself at home. Let's go ahead and take a look here at our recipe. As I mentioned, I've got the three types of beans in here. We already drained them. And I'm gonna pour over them just some water. What we wanna do with this is make sure that we get all of the liquid that was in the cans. Get that out. And it's not bad for you, actually. The only thing is it's a little bit salty. And also in this case, we want our dish to be without that kind of sliminess, which is the fiber that's in the beans. It's not a bad thing, but it's just something that we wanna not have in this recipe. So now we've got them all mixed. You can see the liquid that's coming off is a little bit dark. That's from the black beans. And you just simply pour it through a strainer as we're doing here. And you wanna get as much liquid off as you can because that way you'll have more taste of the dressing. Put your rinsed beans into another dish. Look how pretty that combination of beans is. We've got the black, and then we've got the large garbanzo beans, and the little black-eyed peas, too. So there we go. You can see they're a lot clearer now. This is exactly what we want. Now, another thing I'm gonna add to this dish. Three bean salad normally has green beans in it, too. And I've gone ahead and drained these, but you notice they say no salt added. And that's why we're able to go ahead and put them in here without rinsing them as we did before. So now we've got all the main ingredients for our salad here in the dish. Let's go ahead and take another look at our episode and keep in mind what are the reasons that it makes sense to eat in instead of eating out. She probably has a stash of cookies under her bed. There is no way she'll starve. Sí, el otro día encontré a estos en su cuarto. Okay, ma'am, qué tenemos aquí para comer? Ah, Ben. What do you think we can make with what we have? Hmm. Que sabías, pero no hay salsa. Well, if we don't have salsa, what can we use instead? Ay, chile verde? Yeah, that would be good on the que sabías. And then we could re-fry these beans and mix them for salad. That sounds great to me. Let's go for it. Vamos a lavar las manos. Cuando yo me fui, no había nada. If you stuck around more often, maybe you would learn something about cooking. ¿Pero qué necesita aprender cuando tengo un día? Vendice. Vendice, señor, esta comida que vamos a recibir y voy por tu casa en el nombre de Jesús. Amen. Amen. Y Monique made some great stuff. Oh my gosh, you're kidding. Ah, she sounds cool. She takes you to the library. Will he be wanting dinner? It's just for Monique's turn paper. Yeah, y Fidelo guijo no se queda una novia. Since when is Fidel looking for a girlfriend? Not that young. All the girls at school think he's fresh. Fresh? Can he force himself on the girls? No, he's pretty cool. The gusta las chavas. Fresh means like something new. Ay, gracias a Dios. But to me, he's still my little mijito, eh? Don't have enough tortillas to feed your tío. Vamos a tener de hacer más. Tenemos todo lo que necesitamos. Give me a mom, even if we have all the ingredients, we don't know how to make tortillas. Did abuelita teach you? Sí, tu abuelita me enseñó a hacer tortillas y ahora te voy a enseñar a ti. A ti también, Silvia. Vete para acá. Both of you, bring your plate. Give me the bowl, mijito, por favor. Did you think of any other reasons why it makes sense to eat at home? Well, one of them that's important is you get it to actually sit down and eat with your family. So often when we go out to eat, we end up eating fast food or kind of racing from one place to another. And at home, you can actually sit down and really enjoy each other. So you can eat with your family. And then another thing that I noticed in that episode was eating together is a way of passing down skills in the kitchen to your children. Lisa was really good at getting monique, at least, involved in making the meal. And they had a good time actually visiting together as they did that. So you can teach your kids to cook. Now, another thing you'll notice is they used several different leftover foods that were available in their kitchen. And that's something you always want to take advantage of. You can even have planned overs where you make, say, a roast chicken one night and then use the rest of the chicken another night in order to actually have leftovers without having to do too much work. We're gonna go ahead and continue on with our recipe now. And it's time to make the dressing. Now, this is a lot of beans right here. And beans tend to absorb liquids. So we're gonna make a lot more dressing than you probably think we need. Let's start with the vinegar. Now, vinegar comes in a lot of different kinds. And today, what we're gonna be using is just the plain old white vinegar. We're gonna go ahead and put in a whole cup worth. Okay, so that's a cup. Actually, that's one and a half cups now that I'm reading the measuring cup. So I'm not gonna put in quite that much. That's a cup. Now we're gonna put in a little bit of oil. Now, traditionally, this recipe called for a lot of oil. Almost as much oil as vinegar, in fact. But today, we're just gonna add two tablespoons. This'll give us a nice texture and kind of carry the spices throughout the dressing without being so oily and heavy. Really don't need all of that oil. Now, one of the things that makes three bean salads so delicious is that it actually has sugar in it. And that's why kids, as well as grown-ups, like the salad so much. We're gonna put in two thirds of a cup of sugar, which I've already got measured in here. Sounds like a lot of sugar. And in fact, you can use less if you don't want it quite that sweet. You know, it's a good idea to kind of experiment and see what your family likes to do. Often, the recipes will call for salt. But because we've got so much vinegar and sugar, we don't really need to add extra salt. And besides, most of these were canned with salt. And finally, my favorite part, we're gonna go ahead and add some spices. Now, traditionally, this recipe, the dressing would have several things like salt and pepper, maybe a little celery seed. But today, we're gonna do more of a southwestern flare with our recipe. So I've got several different spices here. First, we have some coriander, which is actually the seed from the cilantro plant. And this is often used in Mexican cooking in beans, for example. Also, we have some cumin seed, which we've used before in our show. Another traditional Mexican favorite. And of course, we don't wanna forget our oregano. And I'll add a little bit of black pepper just for old time's sake. So again, we're gonna use our mortar and pestle. And I don't really like to measure so much as just put in, well, I'm used to working with spices. If you're not used to it, it's nice to kind of try starting with a little bit of spice and then see how your family likes it. And you can always add more at the table or the next time you make the recipe. We've got our molcajete, our mortar and pestle here. And we're just gonna do a little bit of light pounding as we always do. Let's go ahead and pour our spices in. Looks like a lot, but remember, we've got a lot of beans here, too. And the beans will absorb a lot of that flavor. Sometimes this recipe calls for heating up the dressing, but actually you can just kind of let it sit here and dissolve a little bit just until the sugar is dissolved. And we'll let that happen as we're watching our next section of our episode. Let's go ahead and take a look. No, it's not that it's a tortillas, Mom. Why don't we do this more often? Because you're too busy break dancing. Very funny. Mom, tomorrow can we buy a pizza? Ya te dije que no. No podemos salir a cenar pizza mañana. You know we have to save everything we can for the family reunion, pero podemos hacer pizza nosotras mismas. We can't make pizza. Eso crees tú? Hacer pizza es muy fácil. Do we have tomato sauce? We can't. Y tenemos queso. Ipon? Some green peppers in the fridge. Yup, here it is. Ya ven? We have everything we need. Mañana hacemos pizza. And I'll stop by the deli and pick up some Canadian bacon. I like pepperoni instead. Okay, te compro pepperoni. And while you're at it, could you also get a bag of chips? Si, un parque de nomas. Yes, yes. Will be perfect. Lots of cars might track me on Thursday. Come on in. Hi, Theo. Nice to have you. We just learned how to make tortillas today. Como ustedes hicieron tortillas? I don't believe it. Palina. It's about time they learned how to make them. Especially Silvia. You know what I can't believe is that Fidel has a girlfriend. Oh, no, Fidel family and novia. Se llama Margaret. She works at the graduate school office. Es muy buena gente y sabe mucho de nutrición. Nice, like healthy food, boring. She doesn't sound so interesting to me. Portate bien, Silvia. Would you like a quesadilla? Ya comimos nosotros, but we can join you for dessert? No, we ate it El Gordo's again. The Tuesday night special. But you know what, I will have some of that fruit salad. Oh, Monique, aquí te traigo las fotos para tu reporte. You remember, Theo. I'm gonna go work on the porch. I love you. No. Silvia, por qué no te vas a practicar to break dancing, pero con mucho cuidado. Mom, you know I'm always careful. Theo, ¿sabes qué? ¿Qué, amiga? I'm practicing for a town show at the Quartier Center. Wow. Here, let me show you. Ay, es chavala, no se aguanta. So, tell me about this girlfriend. ¿De dónde es? ¿Sabe cocinar? Do we know her family? Calma, this is, I'm not gonna marry her. La conocía en la graduate office. And she seems to be very intelligent. Actually, it was Videl who got this romance going. But I don't even know if she's seen somebody else. She was out of town this weekend. Vamos a ver qué pasa. I think it's great that you're going out. Hey, I got an idea. Let's double date. Juan, en la oficina, todo el tiempo pregunta por ti. No, no, no. No quiero salir con un hombre todavía. I just don't trust him. No puedo olvidar. I'm just trying to get over the loss of my marriage and what Jorge did to me and the girls. No puedo olvidar que me dejó por otra mujer. I know it's been hard, but it'll take time and things will change for you. Hace tres años que se murió Cristina y todavía me duele. No sé cómo lo haces. Pasa escuela, tienes tiempo con Videl. Yo nunca tengo tiempo ni dinero. We have few luxuries. I don't know how you can afford to go out to eat as often as you do. Even working part-time, our food stamps and money just don't go that far. Well, maybe. But that effin nutrition class that she took, that's really seemed to have helped. I've seen a lot of positive changes since we divorced, but actually sis, el dinero no me ha cancel. I'm strapped too. I don't know what I'm going to do. It'll be three days till payday. Don't worry. I have some leftover chicken that needs to get eaten. Let me show you. Mira, con esto lo haces tres comidas y te ayudas a que te paguen. Sis, you're too good to me. Thank you so much. And don't forget to take some of these tortillas that we made para compartirlas con Margaret. This is great. She'll be so impressed. I'm going to tell her that I made them. Carajo? Esa fruta era tan sabrosa. The watermelon was so fresh. Fresh. Do you remember when I was in the 10th grade and I told you that Guillermo Sandoval got fresh with me at the Rio Grande? Remember that? Do you know that your son is considered fresh these days? What? No, no, no, no. Veja me decirte. Veja me decirte que es fresh nowadays. Veja me decirte que es cool. It's cute. Get the girls like him. I know. Like you are. I still am. Like that's fresh. Did you notice one final reason that it makes sense to eat at home? When the girls and Lisa were preparing the tortillas they added powdered milk and some whole wheat flour. That adds a lot of nutrients to tortillas. When you buy them in the grocery store they're not going to be that healthy. Making things at home you can control what you put into your food. Speaking of food, let's go ahead and finish up with our recipe. And this is actually a four bean salad I realized rather than a three bean salad. What we're going to do, we've got our beans here in a larger dish and our sugar has dissolved into the dressing. I'm going to go ahead and pour the dressing over the beans. I'm going to toss this and eat it right away. But the nice thing about this salad is it tastes better if it's had to chance to marinate in the refrigerator overnight. You see it looks pretty soupy but as I mentioned before the beans will absorb a lot of this liquid and it'll taste really even better when you use it as leftovers. Now you can use any kind of beans in this salad. In fact you might want to use some of these butter beans which are really tasty. And in fact you could also use other vegetables like carrots. If you've actually got some fresh stuff on hand throw in a green pepper and some onion as well. Now as we're watching and thinking about our video for next week why not have a goal in mind for your family? Try to eat at least one more home-cooked meal at home together with your family members this coming week. Until next time, long live our families. It doesn't necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.