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The Joy Of Better Cooking: 3 unusual rice recipes to add to your weeknight repertoire
3 years ago
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9 min read
Make the most out of the humble store cupboard ingredient with these three inventive recipes.
Often, when people get asked what their favourite carb is, it’s a close-call between pasta, bread and potatoes – with rice often getting overlooked.
But as a store cupboard staple, it’s cheap, has a long shelf-life and is (much to the disbelief of many) very easy to cook. So there’s no reason why it shouldn’t feature on your weekly repertoire more often – and we’re not just talking as an accompaniment to chillies and curries, but as the star of the dish in its own right.
If you’re lacking inspiration, Australian food writer Alice Zaslavsky is here to help. With her latest book The Joy Of Better Cooking, the award-winning author is arming us with all the confidence we need to get in the kitchen more – and to actually enjoy doing it.
Credit: Murdoch Books
The veg-forward collection of recipes features everything from quick and simple dishes to longer weekend-ready cooks and mouth-watering sweets – but we’re focusing on dishes that are achievable on any night of the week, finding new ways to make the most of what you have in your store cupboard.
Alice’s three rice recipes promise to be more than tempting, offering a twist on the classic dishes of meatballs, tacos and cacio e pepe – along with including helpful tips and information about ingredient swaps and how to use up leftovers to get the most out of your time in the kitchen.
Taco rice
Alice says: “I was gifted this recipe by my mate chai mogul Johnny Aloha, who, as an army brat born in Hawaii, spent part of his childhood in Okinawa. Aptly, it was the American military bases set up in Japan after World War II that led both John’s dad (an army doctor) and Taco Rice (a global sensation) to find their way there in the first place. The dish was originally created to feed hungry marines by an entrepreneurial Okinawan named Gibo, who founded the first King Tacos in Kin in the mid-1980s. He combined surplus army-rationed taco seasoning with minced beef and cut out the taco middle man. I love how the soft sushi rice is the perfect sponge for the spicy mix on top. The history of the dish’s creation speaks to the way food borrows, adapts, enhances; a living language.”
Serves 4
Ingredients
- 350g sushi rice
- 2 teaspoons rice vinegar
- 2 teaspoons caster sugar
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 500g minced beef
- 5-6 spring onions, white and green bits finely sliced separately
- 4 tomatoes, diced
- 4 coriander sprigs, roughly chopped
- 100g shredded cheddar
- 100g corn chips (a good handful)
- ½ iceberg lettuce, sliced into thin wedges
- Lime wedges, to serve
For the taco seasoning (makes enough for a double batch: one for now, one for later):
- 2 teaspoons mild-medium chilli powder
- 4 teaspoons salt flakes (crush these a little between your fingers when adding)
- 4 teaspoons ground cumin
- 4 teaspoons cornflour
- 2 teaspoons dried oregano
- 2 teaspoons ground coriander
- 2 teaspoons ground paprika (hot or sweet – whatever you’ve got)
- 2 teaspoons garlic powder
- 2 teaspoons onion powder
- 1 teaspoon caster sugar
Method
Pop the rice in a fine-meshed sieve and wash under cold running water until the water runs clear. Follow the packet instructions to cook the rice, either by absorption, or in a rice cooker (see Gadget spotlight, below). Meanwhile, combine the vinegar and sugar in a small bowl as your sushi seasoning.
For the taco seasoning, toss all the ingredients in a jar with a lid. Seal tightly and shake to combine. The spice mix will store well for a month in a cool, dark place (although you could easily get 6 months out of it, at a pinch).
Heat a large frying pan until you can feel the warmth radiating when you hold your palm at a sensible distance. Splash in the olive oil. While the beef is still in its container, squash it between your fingers to mash up any squiggles, then place as a whole piece into the pan. Cook over high heat for 5-7 minutes, or until caramelised underneath. Flip it over and cook for a further 2 minutes, then break it up with a wooden spoon. Sprinkle in the white spring onion bits, half the taco seasoning and ½ cup (125 ml) water and stir to combine. Simmer for another 3-5 minutes, until the water evaporates and the sauce thickens.
Toss the tomatoes, green spring onion bits and coriander together in a bowl to make a salsa.
Once the rice is cooked, transfer to a serving platter. Drizzle the vinegar seasoning over and stir to combine, using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula (not metal, as it is too rough on the rice). Top with the beef, then the cheese, then crush the corn chips on top. Arrange the tomato salsa on one side, and the lettuce wedges all about. Serve with lime wedges.
Gadget spotlight: Rice cooker
I’m a born-again rice cooker aficionado, as I came to it quite late and was very much of the ‘what can that do that a pan with a lid can’t?’ camp. The answer, my friend, is FLUFFY RICE! If you ever wonder why your rice never gets as satisfactorily separated and lush like takeaway rice – let alone restaurant rice – then you need to get yourself a rice cooker. They’re surprisingly inexpensive, especially if you choose a multi-cooker that also slow-cooks; some even air-fry! Rice cookers create an optimal air-locked environment to ensure that each and every rice granule gets cooked to its full floof potential. I use mine way more than I expected, and love experimenting with what I add into its bowl – from pandan leaves and crispy fried shallots for jasmine rice, to curry powder and frozen veg for an easy basmati ‘pilaf’.
Tips
For extra crunchy, crisp lettuce, pop it into a salad spinner full of cold water while you prepare the rest of the recipe. Drain and spin just before assembly begins.
If, upon tasting the simmered beef, you would prefer to mellow out the heat, add a few dollops of plain yoghurt to serve. Extremely inauthentic, but it works.
Shortcuts
I’ve offered you a seasoning mix to make up as a gift to your future self, to be whipped out the next time you want to MYO version from scratch, but you could easily just pick up a taco seasoning sachet from the shops, along with a jar of salsa. Both of these were very much a part of the original version – so you could argue that the shortie version is actually more authentic.
Subs
You can make this vego by swapping the beef out for beans and imbuing them with a chilli non-carne flavour. Add some tinned kidney beans to your sweated spring onion mixture, stir the taco spices through and allow everything to sizzle before serving as per the recipe. If you don’t have a mild chilli powder handy, use ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper instead. That is, unless yours is a chilli-loving household, in which case, go big!
Waste not
You are extremely welcome to slice up the entire iceberg lettuce for this dish and snack on any leftovers as you might corn chips – it’s so crunchy! You may also like to use the other half of your iceberg for a leafy salad.
Worth it
I know I’m asking a lot from you to commit to buying all these spices for the taco seasoning, but they’re all used heaps throughout this book. Having a jar of garlic powder is, as far as I’m concerned, as useful on the table as salt and pepper – if something savoury tastes like it could ‘use something’, garlic powder will totally do it.
That’s a spiky meatball tomato soup
Alice says: “Many an Aussie kid who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s scored these meatballs cooked in tinned tomato soup, based on an old Dutch staple, on the regular. The meatballs were made to look like spiky little creatures with the addition of long-grain rice and, once added to the soup, they’d cook and flavour the broth, springing and puffing like magical hedgehogs – or echidnas, to keep the Australiana theme going. This tomato soup isn’t quite out of a tin, but still uses the best processed tomatoes you can find, and the meatballs are made with store-bought sausages, spiked with extra fun bits like currants and pine nuts, making them practically a polpette. It’s a great lesson in letting other people do the hard work for you flavour-wise, so it’s still a super simple soup to prepare, and the taste is just bonza (‘better than good’ in Aussie slang)… or belissima if you’re that way inclined.”
Serves 4-6
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 red onion, diced
- 1 red capsicum (pepper), diced
- 4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
- 125 ml white wine
- ½ teaspoon sweet or smoked paprika (whatever’s in your pantry)
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste (concentrated purée)
- 400g tinned good-quality whole peeled or chopped tomatoes (see Ingredient spotlight)
- 500ml chicken or vegetable stock (no added salt, see Tips)
- 1 teaspoon sugar (any kind will do; just add less if the crystals are finer)
- 1 bouquet garni, made with basil stalks, a stem of dried Greek oregano and 2 bay leaves
- ½ teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
For the meatballs (makes about 35):
- 500g pork and fennel sausages (see Subs)
- 50g finely grated parmesan
- 80g pine nuts (see Subs, page 75)
- 40g currants
- 50g long-grain white rice
- ¼ cup chopped parsley
To serve:
- Finely grated parmesan
- Thinly sliced basil, to garnish
- A drizzle of the very best olive oil
Method
In a large heavy-based saucepan, heat the olive oil and sauté the onion, capsicum and garlic for a minute or two until the mixture starts to sizzle. Pop on the lid and leave to sweat over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, for 5-8 minutes, until the onion has softened.
Pour the wine into the pan, scraping all the yummy flavoursome bits of caramelisation off the bottom to deglaze the pan. Stir in the paprika and tomato paste and sauté for another 2 minutes.
Add the tinned tomatoes, then pour some fresh water into the tin, slosh it around to clean out the dregs and add that to the pan, too, along with another tin’s worth of water. Stir in the stock, sugar and another 4 cups (1 litre) water. Drop in the bouquet garni and bring to the boil, skimming off any froth that rises to the surface.
At this point, fish out the bouquet garni. Get your stick blender out and give the soup a bit of a zhuzh. You can leave a few chunks in, or purée until smooth.
Meanwhile, make a start on the meatballs. Have a little bowl of water nearby. Slip the sausage meat out of the casings into a bowl, and combine with the remaining meatball ingredients. Wet your palms before shaping the mixture into balls the size of walnuts; they’ll expand to golf-ball size as they cook. Some sausages can be fairly salty, so check the seasoning of one of the meatballs by poaching it in the soup for 5 minutes, then taste and add extra salt only if needed.
Pop all the meatballs into the soup and simmer for 35-40 minutes, or until the echidnas emerge out of their burrows and the oil rises to the top, adding more stock or water if needed. Serve garnished with a grating of parmesan, some thinly sliced basil and a drizzle of your best olive oil.
Tips
Don’t even think about adding salt to the soup – as the meatballs cook, they will naturally season the broth, in the same way that adding mussels to a bland broth brings brininess almost instantly.
Subs
You can absolutely make this with a bottle of tomato passata (puréed tomatoes) instead of tinned tomatoes. Just slosh less water in the bottom to extract the last dregs, as it’ll already have a higher liquid-to-tomato ratio. Go nut-free by replacing the pine nuts with another tablespoon of rice.
Turn this dish fully plant-based by making the meatballs out of barley. Nutritionist and author Dorota Trupp has a great recipe for these online, where the barley is ground and simmered in veggie stock, then mixed with onion and garlic and baked in the oven to set.
Double duty
The soup can be cooked right down to a sugo; after blending, keep cooking until it has reduced by half, and you’ll have a rich sauce that you can toss through some cooked spaghetti with the meatballs, or pop inside a toasted Turkish pide with extra parmesan for a meatball sub.
Worth it
Herbaceous little bundles of bouquet garni can really take your dish next-level. They can vary in content, but they involve herbs (mostly dried) that have either been tied off in a bunch like a bouquet, or packed into some form of pouch for steeping. You can make up your own bouquet depending on what herbs you have. Thyme, parsley stalks and bay leaves are the traditional French Provençal version, but you can sub in herbs like rosemary or tarragon, tied off with twine or a heatproof rubber band. Because the herbs are bound or bundled, they can be easily lifted out at the end, to keep simple soups like this one free of bobbing bits of green stuff.
You can store pre-prepped bouquets in the freezer for expediency, or buy pre-prepared little pouches of the stuff in muslin (cheesecloth), which behave like little savoury teabags in the pot.
Ingredient spotlight: Tomatoes
Cooking with tomatoes – whether fresh, tinned, passed into passata or concentrated into paste – is one of the easiest ways to build body and add savoury-sweetness to dishes. No wonder they form the basis of so very many different meals across cuisines of the world.
These various tomato concentrations are a bit like the Golden Girls: it’s great to meet just one, but when they all get together, they say ‘Thank you for being a friend’ to your tastebuds. If a recipe calls for just one form of tomato, feel free to layer in a few others regardless, or at least sub in and out depending on what you have. I’ve listed them above in ascending order of concentration (and hence increasing flavour intensity), so if a sauce is feeling a bit light-on, a teaspoon of tomato paste (concentrated purée) helps build this up, but also speeds up the cooking time, as you won’t need to wait for lots of liquid to boil down.
Speaking of liquid, don’t forget to give the insides of the tomato preservation vessel – whether jar or tin – a good glug with water or stock, to lift off any stubborn bits of produce that would otherwise end up down the sink or in the recycling bin. (Note: if you don’t wash out these containers, they might be deemed ‘contaminated’ and unrecyclable – another reason to get glugging!) Just enough of a splash to slosh it all around will do, unless of course the recipe asks you for extra water like this one, where you can just use the tin as your measuring vessel pre-slosh.
On the ingredient label, less is always more; I’m especially on the lookout for salt and sweeteners, as I’d much rather add these to my own taste. On that, even if a recipe doesn’t include sugar in a tomato-based sauce, I’ll still add a pinch – it tricks your palate into thinking that the tomatoes are riper and more robust. I’ll even do this with fresh tomato salads if the tomatoes are underwhelming.
Cacio e pepe risotto
Alice says: “Cacio e pepe, that classic combination of cheese and freshly cracked black pepper, is here showcased in a risotto. This recipe takes me right back to the time I cooked risotto for the king of risotto milanese, Gualtiero Marchesi, in Parma, Italy. It was a MasterChef challenge, and there were nine others making their own versions, all of us in our own heads as to what was important to remember, and what we could afford to forget about. We were also cooking on camping stoves, on a blustery afternoon, the sun bearing down on us one minute, a gust of wind flapping gold leaf into the bushes the next. Even when cooking risotto at home, we can psych ourselves out with the steps, but I’m here to tell you that if the ingredients are good and you remember to add enough liquid, you’ll be right. There’s even a one-pan, hands-off version if you’re relishing risotto but haven’t the time to stand around the stove… pretty sure Mr Marchesi would hate it.”
Serves 4–6
Ingredients
- 1.5 litres good-quality chicken stock or vegetable stock
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve
- 1 small onion, or 2 French shallots, finely diced
- 440g best-quality arborio or carnaroli rice you can find
- 125ml white wine
- 120g crème fraîche
- 100g aged parmesan
- ½ cup chopped parsley, plus extra leaves to garnish
For the cacio e pepe butter:
- 200g butter, softened
- 100g grated parmesan or pecorino
- 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
- 1 tablespoon freshly cracked black pepper
- 1 teaspoon salt flakes
- ¼ cup chopped parsley
Method
Gently heat the stock in a large saucepan and keep at a simmer on low heat (not boiling). If you have any parmesan rinds in the freezer (see Ingredient spotlight, below), add these to the pan, too.
In a heavy-based pan that isn’t necessarily too wide, gently heat the olive oil.
Pop in the diced onion, wait for a sizzle, then close the lid and cook over medium heat for 5-10 minutes, or until the onion is transparent but not brown.
Add the rice and toast for 2 minutes, or until the rice is glossy, stirring the whole time to ensure every granule is coated.
Keep the pan over medium heat. Add the wine and deglaze the pan, stirring all the time. Once the alcohol has stopped stinging your eyes, start to add the stock, one ladleful at a time, occasionally stirring with a wooden spoon to stop the rice sticking to the bottom. When the stock has been absorbed and you start seeing the base of the pan, add more stock. Repeat this process for about 25-30 minutes. Once there is only about a cup of stock left, taste to see if the rice is cooked. Keep going if it needs longer, adding some hot water from the kettle if needed, but remember, risotto should be al dente (with a bit of chew), and silky, loose and creamy – not stiff and gluggy.
Meanwhile, make the cacio e pepe (CP) butter. Put the butter in a bowl. Using a mortar and pestle, grind the parmesan, garlic, pepper and salt together into a rough paste, like you’re making pesto. Mix the paste through the butter, folding the parsley through at the end.
Once the risotto is al dente, add the crème fraîche, parsley and 50 g of the CP butter. Grate in half the parmesan and stir through. Take off the heat, put a lid on and leave for 5 minutes to rest.
Ladle the risotto into flat bowls, giving them a bit of a shake to settle the risotto. Add an extra dollop of the CP butter to the middle and microplane puffs of the remaining parmesan over the top. Serve sprinkled with the extra parsley, a final crack of pepper and a drizzle of olive oil.
Tips
If you are using a store-bought stock, taste it for salt content before starting, and if you think it’s too salty, dilute it! It’s much easier to add seasoning than to take it out.
Shortcuts
A little bit of butter never goes astray when finishing a risotto, so if you don’t have time to make the CP butter, just swirl in some dobs of butter at the end, along with lots and lots of freshly ground black pepper.
Double duty
You’ll have more CP butter than you need for this recipe – which is good! Roll the left-over butter in baking paper and foil to form a sausage and keep it in the freezer. You can then cut off slices as you need them, to flavour-bomb everything from steaks to steamed greens.
Left-over risotto makes the best arancini balls. Roll the risotto into balls, stuff a little mozzarella in the middle for an added surprise, dredge in plain (all-purpose) flour, then egg wash, then breadcrumbs, then deep-fry or even air-fry.
If you’d prefer to bake rather than fry, pop the arancini on a lined baking tray and bake in a preheated 180°C oven for 20-25 minutes, until golden and crispy. You can cook, cool and freeze your arancini for serving later, too. They’ll last for up to 3 months in the freezer; simply reheat in a 180°C oven until warmed through.
Recipe riffs
This great base recipe can be dressed to the nines to yield myriad risotto variations.
Risotto milanese: Make this classic by leaving out the CP butter and adding a good pinch of saffron threads to the wine. Or, instead of the CP butter, stir some saffron butter through.
Mushroom + thyme: Sauté mushrooms in olive oil with some thyme sprigs, salt and pepper and add at the end.
Pumpkin + sage: Sauté small cubes of pumpkin (squash) with olive oil until golden, then add butter and sage leaves and sauté until the sage is crisp. Stir through at the end.
Roasted beetroot + dill: Pop leftover roasted beetroot cubes through the cooked risotto, along with dill fronds.
Lemon + crab: At the end, stir in the juice and zest from 1 lemon and 100g picked crabmeat.
And all of the above – perhaps even the risotto milanese – would be even better with some of the CP butter stirred through.
Ingredient spotlight: Parmesan
It’s always the dishes with the fewest ingredients that leave the least margin for error. That’s why it’s always best to shell out for a good-quality Parmigiano Reggiano for risottos (and don’t forget to ask for any spare rinds). Parmesan is one cheese we always have in the fridge, ready to be rasped over pasta, or chipped off and eaten as a snack. Parmesan can also be frozen, as can the rinds, which should be saved for using in home-made stocks, or to plop into ready-made stocks when making dishes like this. Aged parmesan is always best, as it gives the amino acids in the cheese time to develop bonus umami flavour. The older parmesan gets, the crumblier it is, and in good-quality Parmigiano Reggiano you’ll be able to taste salt crystals. Resist the urge to buy the powdered stuff, as it is filled with anti-caking agent, and is often not even real cheese. (Yikes!)
The Joy Of Better Cooking: Life-Changing Skills & Thrills For Enthusiastic Eaters by Alice Zaslavsky (£25, Murdoch Books) is out now
Photography: Ben Dearnley
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