I like black beans in my arepa, but that is not to say I like many other things. Every morning in my home, we eat arepas. Each one of us has one arepa with cheese and I used to love this. It has been many years since we started this tradition and now I have probably eaten thousands and thousands of arepas with cheese.
I've told everyone that we need to change the filling but they don't know what with. I also don't know what we could fill our arepas with. There are many things we could put in them but nobody has got the time to prepare those "complex" fillings early in the morning. All the time is used making the dough, grilling cheese and making coffee.
Yesterday and today, we put black beans in our arepas. They are salty, with onions and have other few ingredients. They are prepared differently each time, but when we are going to put them in our arepas, we use a frying pan and put some more onions on them.
I don't know if it's the onions that I like or the beans, but these last two days, I've enjoyed my arepas much more than normal.
I've filled them with other things too like avocado, ham, salad, eggs. I've even tried jam, mayo and ketchup, though I'd be thrown in a hole and stoned if someone heard that I did that (praise anonymity). But none of these has come close to black beans.
I think that the ones that have been the closest are "carne mechada" (meat in strips), which is heavily seasoned and as tasty as beans, and arepas with mixed fillings like avocado, cheese, egg, fried ham and maybe a bit of pink sauce (ketchup+mayo mixture).
By the way, it's strange that arepas can have "pink sauce" and not mayo or ketchup alone. 🤔
Looking at that picture also reminds me that I've eaten lots of strange sandwiches lately looking for tasty things out of the norm. I've eaten toasts with banana, with potatoes, with green beans and other combinations. It really comes down to preference, but it's cool to try everything and find exactly what you like.