Red Rice and Stuff

Whenever I'm left to my own devices to find a dinner for myself, I fall back on asian cooking. It's good when you have not many ingredients and it uses up my fierce soysauce addiction. This meal started as an excuse to eat the rice.

See, ages ago I picked up what I thought was red rice at the asian market. Turns out it was mashed little dried red beans, and when I cooked it like rice it burned and came out horrible, and even sugaring it with the plan of making riceballs stuffed with red bean paste didn't save them. Sad.

So this time, I took the little bits and threw maybe a tablespoon in with the basmati, and that was much more successful. No burning, and it turned the rice this great Chinese red color without changing the flavor too much, except maybe the slightest hint of a sweetness. It looks kind of orangy-pinky in the picture, but it was way redder in person.

Anyway, so here I was, hungry, with red rice. What goes with that? Chicken! Salmon! Broccolli! I'm not good at stirfry (I think it's cuz I don't have a wok and those long cooking chopsticks. yeah, that's it.), but I'm great at steaming, so that's what I did. Sliced the chicken up really thin so it'd cook faster and steamed it with a little oil, a little butter, alot of soy sauce, a little rice wine vinegar and a few minced garlic cloves and alot of pepper. Then steamed the salmon without defrosting it so the fishwater helped it deglaze the chicken-yummy, and threy the broccolli in with it, and tossed the chicken back in to heat while it finished off.

Result? Yum!

Classic Food: Yellow Rice Balls

This is something I made a ways back, not long after we moved back into this house, and have since made two or three other times: Yellow Rice Balls. Not really a fusion menu, since I used yellow rice and chicken entirely as we make them normally, but I don't think I ever use my riceball press enough, and I thought this would be cute. And it was.

Yellow rice was two medium bags of Viggo rice, a green pepper, an onion, a chopped tomato or so, and far too much garlic, because there is no such thing, cooked with chicken broth. This was made when I was still at the restaurant, so the broth was from there, and didn't include any boiled chicken, but it worked out better that way, because frozen chicken breast can be shredded and cooked with Spanish Spices (cumin and chili powder, mostly, with more garlic and some adobo, and alot of salt and pepper-- seasoned really strongly, because rice will steal all your flavor otherwise), and a little tomato sauce, just regular marinara we had in the fridge, to keep it moist.

Then make like a rice ball: Fill the bottom half of the mold, mine makes two at a time, and leave a little dent for filling. Fork a small ball of filling into the dent (that one on the right had too much filling and didn't stick together well, so be sure you keep rice on all sides of said filling so it can seal up), and then top with an equal amount of more rice. Put the top of the mold in, and press down hard enough to make it all stick together like sushi, but not so hard that it's one solid and impossible-to-eat mass. If they'll be cooling off before you eat them, like if they're for a bento or something, leave them a little looser, because they compact as the steam leaves them and they'll get gooey and hard.

The whole time I was making these, the cheese had been sitting on the counter, forgotten, so when they were ready, it was all soft and moldable-- so I made sharp cheddar omibushi to sit on top.

These two selft alot of space on the plate, and I wished for presentation we had a salad to put with them, but that's like two cups of rice almost, and it made a whole meal, with the addition of leftover chicken as a sort of small second course.

Rice And Protein And Chese

I've been sick all this week, and on top of that, it's my first full week back at work, and I'm kinda busted, so when I got hungry the other night, I made an old stand-by meal: Rice + Protein + Cheese. It really should have a better name then that, but it's so mutable that it'd sound like a dozen different meals. So this one is made with basmati rice cooked in veggie broth for extra flavor and nutrients (and because I sort of wanted soup, but not really), topped with a Black Bean Veggie Burger from Morning Star Farms that I crisped up in the toaster oven and then chopped into bike-sized pieces, then with sharp cheddar cheese and mild salsa. On the side is steamed veggies-- broccoli, mostly, and greenbeans, corn and peas, cooked with some random seasonings and adobo and topped with more chese.

Ta da! A perfect meal for one: about 2/3 cup of rice, one burger, maybe an ounce of cheese and 2/3 cup veggies. And basically healthy. When made with water, it's only about 450 calories-- we ate alot of variations of this when H and I were on a diet two years ago. And the fact that any rice, any protein and any cheese can be combined makes it almost as versatile as pasta.

Yum!

Orange Rice and Chicken

Damn, I really need to get a camera better than my phone...

Anyway, last night's dinner was Orange Rice and Chicken with Extra-Sharp White Cheddar.

Orange rice is made the same way as yellow rice-- this was a medium and a large bad of Mahatma Yellow Rice-- but instead of water, use chicken broth and add veggies. Directions are like so:

Boil a chicken.
This one was a big meaty one, but any chicken will do. Fresh broth is the best broth as far as flavor, so we always get the meat and the broth from the same place. Put the chicken in the pot with pepper and garlic, and boil for at least an hour.

Make the rice.
Add the rice and the broth into a big sturdy pot, and cook according to directions, but with less broth than recommended, because the veggies add extra water. If I'd followed directions, it would have been seven and a half cups and that a) wouldn't have fit in the pot I had, and b) would have been really really mushy.
Add one onion, one green pepper, and one can of fire roasted tomatoes (that's why it's Orange and not Yellow Rice).
Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until it's done like with normal rice. It'll probably burn; something about yellow rice makes it always burn, and the few times when it hasn't, it also wasn't good. I know paella is meant to burn, so maybe that's why. Anyway, just becareful you don't scrape up the burned bits if you don't want that, and it enhances the flavor of the roasted tomatoes either way.

(If the meat isn't falling off the chicken yet, refill the pot and let it boil longer while the rice cooks-- you've got somewhere around a half hour before the rice is done, and you'll get a second batch of broth you can jar up and save for later in the fridge.)

Pick the chickens.
When it's ready, pull the chicken out of the pot and debone it like a vulture as soon as it's cool enough to touch, picking out all the little bits of meat. There's really great pockets of tastiness on the backs of the hips (oysters), the shoulders above the wings, and the back. Anything that isn't gristle and skin can go in, and things like thighs and breast are better if you keep them in sort of big chunks.
Toss the bones, or save them for more stock, but I think they're pretty spent by this point if you've double-boiled them like I do.

Mix it up.
This is easiest in the pan that you picked the chicken in-- once the bones and bits are out, dump the rice on top of the chicken and fold it all together.

Top with the cheese, and eat it all up.

With this much rice, it makes enough for five people to eat twice.