Chris’ Special Rice
- 4 cloves of garlic
- Quantity here can be varied to taste and/or tolerance for effects the next day. I have been known to use whole heads sometimes. Peel the clove and slice them thinly.
- 1 medium size red onion
- Doesn’t have to be red really, but the more ‘fragrant’ the better. Cut it into chunks bigger than your thumbnail, you decide how much bigger.
- 2 bell peppers
- Preferrably some combination of red, yellow, or orange, since green ends up looking funny in the final product. If you leave one or both of these out, you will need to add some liquid. Again, thumnail sized chunks.
- sun-dried tomatoes
- Quantity here is to taste. I usually use a tight double-handful, and I usually cut them into relatively thin strips with kitchen shears, since more surface area means more extraction of the flavour into the liquid. If you want the tomatoes to be less about flavouring the liquid and more about providing flavour bursts in the finished product, you can leave them whole, or cut them into big chunks.
- can of chiptoles in adobo
- You must seed the peppers and dice them into very small pieces. The number of peppers to use depends how hot you want it to be. For the other quantities in this recipe, 2 peppers makes a relatively mild rice with a nice cumulative heat, and 3 or 4 makes it spicy.
- 1 bag of funky rice
- I like to use Lundberg Black Japonica, Trish likes their Wild Blend. The other quantities in this recipe are based on a 2 1/2 cup bag of Lundberg rice.
- 5 cups of broth
- For a “no meat” situation, you use vegetable broth. With no restrictions, I prefer to use the low sodium chicken broth. If I were the sort of chef who actually kept stocks around the house I would use them, but I am too lazy for that.
- 1 can of black beans
- What is there to say about a can of beans?
- 2 packages of PC Fajita seasoning
- The secret ingredient. I am slightly shamed that this isn’t a from scratch preparation of my secret spices and seasonings, but this works so well, and it so easy… You definitely won’t need to add any salt, since this covers that for sure.
- cilantro
- To taste. Leave it out if you haven’t yet developed the taste for cilantro.
This is called Chris’ Rice because I made it up, although Trish makes it just as often as I do these days–she’s stealing all my signature dishes! It’s very similar to lots of rice & bean dishes, but my genius is in combining chi-chi rice from the health food section with the white trash glory of using prepared fajita seasoning in the liquid, and then topping it all of with chipotle goodness.
Take a big pot. Not that little one. And not the one you make your KD in. And no, not that monster that you can put a whole chicken in. You know the one I mean.
Put some kind of oil in the bottom of the pot. Just a bit–enought cover the bottom of the pot. I usually use extra-virgin olive oil, but you decide. Hell, you could even use butter if you wanted to. Heat the oil to low side of medium.
Toss in your onions and garlic, and cook them until they soften. It shouldn’t be hot enough to brown them–the point here is really to suck onion and garlic flavour into the oil.
Now throw in the rice grains, and stir them up well, trying to get the oil as a coating around the grains.
Now pour in your broth, give it a stir, and turn up the heat. You want this to start boiling.
While it’s heating up, toss in the tomatoes, the peppers, and the seasoning.
Once it starts to boil, set the heat to keep it simmering, and cover. How long it simmers depends on what kind of rice you used. Essentially you want to simmer until the liquid is absorbed. That’s going to be at least 40 minutes for Lundberg rice.
While you’re waiting, you can:
- seed and dice the chipotles
- open, rinse, and drain the black beans
- chop the cilantro
Once the rice is ready, take it off the heat, stir in the beans and chipotles (stir well–getting those chipotles distributed is key), and let sit for a couple of minutes.
Just before serving, stir in the cilantro. Alternately, you can make the chopped cilantro a garnish on top, or provide it as a side for people to add as they wish.
Despite how long it took me to write that out, it’s actually very simple, and doesn’t take that much prep time.
Obvious variations: altering the hot pepper element. We have been known to use dried peppers instead of dealing with canned chipotles. Chilly Chiles has a ridiculous selection of whole dried peppers they will ship you. In this case you need to put the peppers in with the everything else at the start of the liquid phase. (You could also grind the dried peppers and add them at the end).
Making the whole bag of rice results in lots more rice than you will eat in one serving. That’s OK. Later on you can take tortilla shells, and wrap them around some of the leftover rice, sprinkling some salsa and some chopped cilantro inside. You can then line up several of these rolled-up tortillas in a baking dish, top them all with salsa and grated cheese, and bake in the oven until the tortilla’s get crunchy. Instant left-over goodness.
So, this weekend we had some folks over for dinner–one of the first times we’ve done this in the last year and a half, since Sarah is now pretty reliable in her sleeping–and I think the food turned out pretty well.
We’ve learned our lesson about menu planning–at an earlier event where we had booze in every course, from the wine salad dressing to the bourbon sauce on the dessert, only to find out that one of our guests couldn’t have anything with alcohol. Oops.
So now we always ask first about menu restrictions, and this time we got “no meat, no dairy”, which I chose to view as an exciting challenge. The meat thing wasn’t much of a problem–we’re not terribly big meat eaters anyway, chicken mostly and almost never any read meat–so we have lots of familiar meals that don’t involve meat. The dairy thing was trickier, since I am desperately in love with cheese, and I often use at least some butter in cooking. Still, things turned out pretty well, I think.
We started with some spread-y options to go with some sliced baguette and small pitas. (Note: apparently J-rod can bake a lovely pita.) We had some roasted garlic (I love garlic), Trish had made some fresh hummus (more garlic), I had picked up a goat cheese / roasted red pepper torte, etc. We also had some chips & pineapple salsa that one of our guests brought.
When we moved on to the mains we served Chris’ Rice (see above) as our entree, accompanied by a simple salad of spinach, pears, and toasted pecans with a honey-pear dressing. (I also had some crumbled blue cheese for people who wanted it–mostly me–to add).
Later on, when we had somewhat recovered out appetites, Trish provided us with a lovely dessert of baked apples in a caramel-calvados sauce, with vanilla frozen yogurt for those who eat dairy. It was yummy, but not as good as her baked peaches.
