I have seen various recipes for Cuban Picadillo over the years and somehow have delayed trying one until tonight. I love green olives and capers. I was leary of the kids’ reactions due to raisins (which they don’t particularly like). All the recipes I’ve seen call for ground beef of course, but we’ve been on a ground turkey kick lately, possibly due to Costco’s prices. 😉 I usually try not to experiment too wildly when the girls have friends for dinner but my youngest had a friend over tonight and I went ahead and fixed this anyway. I think she liked it more than my own kids (she had seconds!). But my girls both declared it good as well, despite their initial misgivings. This recipe is courtesy of Cooking Light Complete Cookbook: A Fresh New Way to Cook (Book & CD-ROM), which I picked up at Costco the other day.
The picture below shows it made with ground beef, because that’s what I used the next time I made it and I hadn’t taken a picture of the ground turkey version.
When I’m cooking something like this, I like to do all the slicing and chopping ahead of time and have everything ready to go.
Cuban Picadillo
Ingredients
- 1 tsp olive oil
- 1 cup chopped onion about 1 small onion
- 1 pound ground turkey or beef
- 3 garlic cloves peeled and minced
- 1 cup beef broth
- 1/3 cup raisins
- 1/3 cup chopped green olives stuffed with pimentos
- 3 Tbs capers
- 1 Tbs tomato paste
- black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Heat the oil and add the chopped onion, cooking until soft (about 5 minutes). Add the ground beef or turkey and garlic, and cook until the meat is no longer pink, stirring periodically. Add the broth, raisins, olives, capers, and tomato paste. Stir and bring to a simmer, then cover and cook 25 minutes or so.
- Serve over steamed white rice.
Notes
Supposedly it goes great with fried plantains but I just fried sliced bananas in some butter, about 4 minutes per side, until slightly browned. They were good! But the girls didn’t even want to try them so I served some sliced red pepper, carrots, and celery on the side.
The cookbook said 4 servings. With 3 teenage girls and me, we ate slightly more than half so have a good 3-4 servings left for lunches.
I’m going to try this this weekend! sounds really good! thanks!