Well, hello!  I’m so excited to share this simple but delicious recipe with you!  “But wait, you crazy Canuck,” you say, “what do YOU know about Southwestern cuisine?”  Fair enough – as a pale-skinned, Canadian gringa, probably less than most.  But I do know that any meal featuring corn, black beans, tomatoes, lime and spices screams Southwestern to me, and after making this recipe, I think it will make you a believer, too.  It’s bursting with fresh flavours (but the sneaky secret is that you can get away with using canned goods so you can experience flavours of the Southwest all year ’round) and is a quick family favourite.  Bonus: there’s only one dish, so prep is fast and easy and clean-up is, too!

Not to toot my own horn (which of course means that I am about to toot my own horn), but one thing I have gotten really good at over the past eight or nine months (no, not a pregnancy, just the length of time since I took over nearly-full kitchen duties from Mr. Golden Graham because I wanted to explore and devote some time and effort to some detailed nutrition and fitness strategies) is making delicious, nutritious and FAST, family-pleasing suppers.  Count ’em – that’s four meal-time attributes and on a good day, I’d take any two together.  But this meal does all four!  Let me show you how I (and you can) do it, too!

Here are the ingredients.  It’s always nice to use fresh, but the beauty of the recipe and part of its speed is that you probably already have most, if not all, of these on hand in your cupboards already (if not, they’re easy to pick up during your regularly-scheduled grocery shopping trip – no need to search for specialty ingredients, and no need to worry about using them in the recipe right away because they’re mostly non-perishable anyway).

You can, of course, use fresh ingredients to substitute for some or all of the canned items mentioned but you will need to have prepared these in advance or expect to spend more time in the kitchen getting this meal together – an altogether worthy endeavour, if you’re up for it!

My husband is not a fan of cilantro (I know, but I married him anyway), so I use dried coriander (the ground seeds of the cilantro plant – cilantro refers to the leafy green part), for a similar but more subtle flavour profile:

Here’s the one fresh star of my show, the perfectly ripe, perfectly round, and perfectly red cherry tomatoes in season at my local grocery store (hard-to-find ingredients that we take for granted in North American, such as bottles of vanilla extract, make me wail and gnash my teeth as far as a grievance of grocery shopping in South Korea, but I have to give my accolades for their ability to source and stock gorgeous seasonal produce all year round):

Now, to put it all together:

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