Summertime Rice & Beans

Throughout the winter, I love whipping up big batches of soups and chili on a Sunday afternoon for lunch throughout the week.  During the summer, however, it is just tooooooo hot to eat soup and chili on a regular basis.  So I stopped cooking a weeks worth of food on Sundays.

And started eating pop tarts for lunch.

Last weekend, I thought to myself, There has got to be something in between pop tarts and chili!

And there is.  Ohhhhhhh there is.

Summertime Rice & Beans

1 cup uncooked White Rice

1 can Black Beans

1 can Red Beans

1 can Whole Kernel Corn

1 can Rotel

2 tbsp. Lime Juice

Get your rice started.

How do you all cook rice?  Bruce uses his rice cooker, but I like doing it the old fashioned way.  Boil 2 cups of water ... 

... add your rice ... 

... and mix in 1 tbsp. of butter and 1 tsp. of salt.

Maybe it's not the old fashioned way of doing things.  Maybe it's the unhealthy way.  I don't care.  It tastes delicious.

Anyway, cover, reduce to low and let simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, while your rice is simmering ...

Drain and rinse the black beans, red beans and corn.

Pour mixture into pot and place on stove.  Add lime juice to the mixture and stir carefully.

Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of yourself adding lime juice to something?  Harder than you would think.  The picture was terrible, but I swear I added it.  Use your imagination.

Add Rotel (but don't drain!).  Turn stove on Med to Med/High.

Bring mixture to a boil.  Stir carefully so nothing burns to the bottom of the pot.

When the rice is cooke, turn off the stove and add to pot.

Stir everything together.

Yum.

I'm not even joking.  This fed me all week and I've still got some to spare.  It probably cost a grand total of $4 to make and it was so easy!  Yesterday morning I decided to grate up some cheese when I was getting my lunch ready and melted it on top when I heated it up at the hospital.  SO delicious.  I was also thinking it would make an incredible burrito filler if I had some tortilla wraps.

Does anybody else have inexpensive recipe that are more summertime-appropriate?  Help a girl out!