Puerto Rican cuisine consists of the cooking style and traditional dishes original to Puerto Rico. It has been primarily a fusion influenced by the ancestors of the Puerto Rican people: the indigenous Taínos, Spanish Criollos and sub-Saharan African slaves. As a territory of the United States, the culinary scene of Puerto Rico has also been moderately influenced by American cuisine.
Latin American cuisine is the typical foods, beverages, and cooking styles common to many of the countries and cultures in Latin America. Latin America is a highly racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse with varying cuisines. Some items typical of Latin American cuisine include maize-based dishes arepas, empanadas, pupusas, tacos, tamales, tortillas and various salsas and other condiments. Sofrito, a culinary term that originally referred to a specific combination of sautéed or braised aromatics, exists in Latin American cuisine. It refers to a sauce of tomatoes, roasted bell peppers, garlic, onions and herbs. Rice, corn, pasta, bread, plantain, potato, yucca, and beans are also staples in Latin American cuisine.
Gallo pinto or gallopinto is a traditional dish from Nicaragua in Central America. Consisting of rice and beans as a base, gallo pinto has a long history and is important to Nicaraguan and Costa Rican identities and cultures, just as rice and beans variations are equally important in many Latin American cultures as well. It has similarities with the Cuban moros y cristianos dish. It is served with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Moros y Cristianos is a traditional Cuban dish served both in homes and in restaurants. It is the Cuban version of rice and beans, a dish found throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the Southern United States.
Red beans and rice is an emblematic dish of Louisiana Creole cuisine traditionally made on Mondays with kidney beans, vegetables, spices and pork bones as left over from Sunday dinner, cooked together slowly in a pot and served over rice. Meats such as ham, sausage, and tasso ham are also frequently used in the dish. The dish is customary – ham was traditionally a Sunday meal and Monday was washday. A pot of beans could sit on the stove and simmer while the women were busy scrubbing clothes. The dish is now fairly common throughout the Southeast. Similar dishes are common in Latin American cuisine, including moros y cristianos, gallo pinto and feijoada.
Rice and beans, or beans and rice, is a category of dishes from many cultures around the world, whereby the staple foods of rice and beans are combined in some manner. The grain and legume combination provides several important nutrients and many calories, and both foods are widely available. The beans are usually seasoned, while the rice may be plain or seasoned. The two components may be mixed together, separated on the plate, or served separately.
Hoppin' John, also known as Carolina peas and rice, is a peas and rice dish served in the Southern United States. It is made with cowpeas, mainly, black-eyed peas and Sea Island red peas in the Sea Islands and iron and clay peas in the Southeast US, and rice, chopped onion, and sliced bacon, seasoned with salt. Some recipes use ham hock, fatback, country sausage, or smoked turkey parts instead of bacon. A few use green peppers or vinegar and spices. Smaller than black-eyed peas, field peas are used in the South Carolina Lowcountry and coastal Georgia. Black-eyed peas are the norm elsewhere.
Colombian cuisine is a culinary tradition of the six main regions within Colombia. Colombian cuisine varies regionally and is influenced by Indigenous Colombian, Spanish, and African cuisines, with a slight Arab influence in some regions.
Takikomi gohan is a Japanese rice dish seasoned with dashi and soy sauce and mixed with mushrooms, vegetables, meat, or fish. The ingredients are cooked together with the rice. The dish is consumed by people in Japan around the fall season since many root vegetables and mushrooms are harvested during this season in Japan. Ingredients will vary based on the seasonal vegetables and fish. Since the dish has nutritional value, and uses a small amount of rice with vegetables and proteins, some Japanese people eat it for dieting purposes.
Dominican cuisine is made up of Spanish, indigenous Taíno, Middle Eastern, and African influences. The most recent influences in Dominican cuisine are from the British West Indies and China.
Arroz a la valenciana or Valencian rice is a name for a multitude of rice dishes from diverse cuisines of the world, which originate from the rice-cooking tradition of the Valencian Community, in eastern Spain.
Coconut rice is a dish prepared by cooking white rice in coconut milk or coconut flakes. As both the coconut and the rice-plant are commonly found in the tropics all around the world, coconut rice, too, is found in many cultures throughout the world, spanning across the equator from Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, South America, Central America, West Africa, East Africa, the Caribbean and Oceania.
Arroz con gandules is a combination of rice, pigeon peas, and pork, cooked in the same pot with sofrito. This is Puerto Rico's national dish along with roasted pork.
The Cayman Islands are a group of islands situated in the Caribbean Sea just between Cuba and Honduras. After being colonized first by Jamaica and then by the British, Cayman Islands remained under British dependency since 1962. Traditional Cayman Islands cuisine is very tied to Jamaican cuisine and they also kept British influences in their cooking, but you can as well find a large variety of international dishes with a local twist. As for traditional dishes the main ingredients are coconut, plantain, cassava, yams, rice and peas. Jamaican cuisine enriched Cayman’s cuisine by offering a large variety of spices such as jerk, curry and other exotic seasonings. The humid soil provides a large variety of exotic fruits and vegetables such as yellow squash, avocados, callaloo, cassava, calabash, spring onions, pineapples, tomatoes, peas, chili, peppers a great range of citrus fruits such as oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits, bananas and plantains, sweet potatoes, yams and mangoes.
Moro de guandules is a rice and pigeon pea dish from the Dominican Republic.
The pigeon pea or toor dal is a perennial legume from the family Fabaceae native to the Eastern Hemisphere. The pigeon pea is widely cultivated in tropical and semitropical regions around the world, being commonly consumed in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Stew peas is a Jamaican stew prepared using coconut milk, beans and salted meat. It is a common dish in Jamaica.
Arroz de fríjol cabecita negra is a rice-based dish from the Caribbean Coast of Colombia that utilizes black-eyed peas as the legume, differing from other rice dishes that are usually prepared with different legumes such as beans, peas, lentils, and Pigeon peas.
