Arroz a la Cubana

Hello, tender friends!

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Forgive me for not posting on Thursday, but I didn’t think anyone would want to read about this after eating a Thanksgiving dinner.

This is a super easy and nutritious breakfast that you can mostly prep in one shot. I first ate this dish when I studied abroad in Valencia, Spain my junior year of undergrad.

How I miss experiencing local gastronomy when I traveled in my younger years. Novel flavor combinations brought such delight! How often I thought, Wow, I never thought of that. Why have I never thought of combining those flavors before!?

Arroz a la cubana was a staple in the dining hall of my dorm in Valencia. (Unlike in the United states, where the dining hall is in a separate building, the dining hall was literally the bottom floor of my dorm in Valencia). The other Americans and I were all confused by its name because we were in Spain, not Cuba.

I don’t remember asking about why it was called arroz a la cubana. We were all struggling so much to tread water and adapt to life abroad at the time that that particular misnomer probably didn’t stand out. But please know that it doesn’t actually have anything to do with Cuba.

Here’s how I make it:

1. Prep rice as discussed in this post.
2. Defrost my homemade tomato sauce, complete with a burst of summer sunshine that keeps well in the freezer. If you don’t have this, you can use your preferred tomato sauce.
3. Fry eggs over easy in butter.
4. Top the rice with tomato sauce and eggs.

I didn’t have any issues with illness when I was 21 because youth was still on my side, so I occasionally ate a little bit of the rice. Smashing the yolks of the eggs and watching the yellow bleed into the rice and tomato sauce was strangely satisfying. It was like watching the sun explode, but in a good way.

This was one of those dishes, like so many others I ate abroad, that made me realize how limited my life had been up until that point. I marveled at how I enjoyed ketchup with my eggs but never thought to use tomato sauce instead.

The best part about this if you’re a mom is that it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Simply prep a few days worth of rice at a time. In the morning, all you have to do is heat up the rice and tomato sauce in a saucepan while you fry the eggs. I can serve Cub his breakfast and clean up the dishes in 15 minutes or less.

Are you ready for the Super Mom hack? I often soft boil eggs instead of frying them up so that I don’t have to clean up a frying pan. If you put a dab of butter in with the rice in the eggs, the flavor profile is the same.

This feeds your kid all the major macronutrients with no sugar besides that which naturally occurs in the rice. Winning!

Okay, that’s all for today, tender friends! I’d initially envisioned this blog as a place for moms, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Hopefully someone else will find this useful!

Thank you for stopping by, and have a great day! Thursday’s post will be about Cub’s birthday party!

Thank you for sharing!

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