Recado, or recao, or recaito. A seasoning blend/marinade that is a great way to use fresh ingredients to give your food great flavor.

This blend can go by a lot of names. My mother in law sometimes just calls it “una mescla” or a mix. It can also vary in ingredients and quantities based on taste or availability. This is how we made it recently, but you can add/adjust according to your preferences and what you have.

With this blend, I love adding it to beans or even cooking rice in it to make arroz verde. What I made was enough to make arroz verde now, and freeze several helpings for the future. Freezing is a great way of preserving fresh recao. If you’re cooking beans, you can just drop a cube from the freezer right into the pot to season the beans. This blend also makes a great marinade for any kind of protein, but this vegetarian isn’t going to futher explore that topic!

This is the mix we did.

First, on bunch of cilantro. We used store bought as our cilantro bolted in June. I love making this blend in the spring or fall with garden fresh cilantro too.

Second, we added three sweet peppers from the garden and one chopped onion.

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Next up came three green onions and a couple cloves of garlic.

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Now, leeks aren’t traditional in this recipe, but I had several so I figured I’d toss one in.

Next up is the juice from two limes.

There are just a few more ingredients. I added a handfull of parsley leaves but didn’t photograph it. When I started blenging I added a small amount of water through the blender lid just to help start the blending process. Then I added salt and pepper. That was it this time.

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After all of the ingredients are blended until smooth. It should be slightly more liquidy then pesto. This will keep in the fridge for a week and in the freezer for a lot longer. We set some aside to make arroz verde but froze the rest.

As I mentioned before, this is not something that we do exact measurements on, or even the same ingredients. You can make this spicy with the introduction of a hot pepper. I’ve added culantro in the past. I’ve even done this blend with carrots and celery. Go with what your preferences are, or what you have available. Do you have a seasoning blend you like to make? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.