Portuguese Boiled Dinner

Good Morning!

I haven’t done a food post in a few weeks so today I decided to write about one of my favorite summertime meals: Portuguese Boiled Dinner!

I made this last week and posted a couple of videos of it to my Instagram stories. I got a few replies and comments back on my stories and decided to just share a little more detail and the full recipe here in case anyone wants to take a stab at making it!

First, a little background:

I grew up eating this meal at least once every summer. It’s mostly a summertime meal because it involves string beans and if you want the best tasting string beans then you wait until the summer and get fresh ones from a farm stand!

My family always just called this meal: Linguica, String Beans, & Potatoes, but I recently started calling it Portuguese Boiled Dinner since it really is kind of a play on a traditional Irish boiled dinner!

Ingredients:

Linguica or Chourico

Potatoes – basic white potatoes

String Beans

Yellow Onions

Salt & Pepper

I always make too much food so I used almost 3 lbs. of meat and, about 3/4 of a 5lb. bag of potatoes, 5 yellow onions, and 1-1.5 lb. of string beans. This would definitely be enough for a family of 4 plus some leftovers!

Step One:

Prep Work!

Get your largest pot out and fill with water. Add some salt and put it on the stove to get it boiling.

Wash the string beans and cut off the stems of each bean.

Wash and peel the potatoes. Cut the larger potatoes in half.

Peel the onions. Just peel, do not cut up.

Take linguine and/or chourico out of the packaging and cut up into 3″-4″  pieces.

Step Two:

Cooking!

Add the potatoes to the boiling water first since they take the longest amount of time to cook. For smaller size potatoes, I just peeled and dropped into the pot. For larger sized potatoes, I just cut them in half once and dropped into the pot. Let them boil for roughly 10 minutes alone before adding any other ingredients.

After 10 minutes, add in the onions and let boil for a couple of minutes.

Then add the string beans and meat at the same time.

From here you simply just wait for everything to cook! I would estimate that it maybe took another 25-30 minutes! The only tricky part is trying to get the timing right so that everything  finishes cooking at the same time because no one wants soggy, overcooked potatoes!

The meat provides a lot of flavoring to the vegetables and all that is needed before you eat is some salt and pepper to enhance the taste!

That’s it! This meal is easy and really good! It’s a boiled dinner, but a much faster one than the one I make on St. Patrick’s Day which basically cooks all afternoon! This Portuguese version is a breeze to whip up after work and enjoy!

xo

Holly