Mexican Rice Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make a Mexican rice and it gonna be really fun because we’re gonna make it green which means there’s gonna be a ton of greens in this rice so it’s basically like a salad but yummier.

And we’re also going to put some really nice spicy Mexican flavors in there as you may know I’m not a huge fan of the spiciness but every so often I throw some in there for you so I hope you enjoy it.

I’m gonna make mine a little bit less spicy of course you can always go spicier and the recipe is kind of the middle of the road so I’m gonna do it a little bit less spicy than I actually posted on the recipe.

Alright! So to start I’m going to blend some greens in my blender, kind of like a green smoothie but we’re not gonna add any fruit or anything like that.

So what I’ll do to start is get some spinach and I’ve washed this spinach. The nice thing about blending greens up is you don’t have to worry about drying them off. You can just wash them, check them in there and you’re set to go.

And I like a lot of green so I’m gonna put quite a bit in here. Now the one tricky thing about blending greens is that they don’t really want to blend very well and you need to make sure you add enough water. Excuse me!

Alright! Back to this, so I’ve got my spinach in the blender with plenty of water, stick it on here and like I said it might be a little bit tricky at first until you get some crush of greens in the bottom you might have to stop the blender, shove it down, keep going. Ok?

Now don’t get discourage, it might take a little while to get to this point, you might have to stop your blender often like I said and just keep things a stir in here and then start it again.

But once you’ve got yourself a nice beautiful green juice going on down there which you could drink if you want to it will get easier going forward so what I’m gonna add next is some cilantro which for those of you like me who aren’t big fan of cilantro this can be a scary thing, I’m adding it because it really is you know a good essential Mexican flavor.

But to be honest if it was just me for dinner I probably wouldn’t add this but here we go. Ok! That’s in there, I’m also gonna add a nice big bunch of parsley to soften things up and a tip with the blender if you chopped things up before you put it in, it’s much easier to blend.

Greens actually works really well with hand blenders, if you have a hand blender because you can actually move the blender around whereas with this blender the greens have to work their way down to the bottom, food processor also excellent!

Ok! So now that we have the spinach blended up if you get the herbs here down into the spinach juice things will go much smoother from here on out.

You may need to add more liquid, I’m also going to throw just because I happen to have some fresh oregano here that I haven’t use for anything else I’m gonna throw that in but it’s not necessary.

I’m also going to add half a can of coconut milk and this is going to smooth things out, also add a bit more liquid but you might noticed when you blend that greens they tend to make you know green stuff on the top and then they separate from the water at the bottom.

If you add some coconut milk it helps to keep those things together, smooth things out. If you’re making a smoothie out of this, banana does the same function. So give it another blend wait until those herbs are nice and smooth and we’re ready to head on.

So its bright beautiful green and like I said it’s a smooth, homogeneous mixture if you will because the water does not separate out from the greens because of the coconut milk that we put in there.

Last thing to add here is a jalapeno pepper, there she is just take the seeds out because they’re super super spicy and be careful when you’re cutting it because it will burn your fingers if you have any cut in your fingers or just in general if you have sensitive skin it will burn.

If you really like spicy foods you can add two of these or a Serrano pepper which is spicier than the jalapeno whatever you like.

Alright! Jalapeno seeded, chopped, blended. Woo! Ok moving on at the fun part, I got an onion and what I’m gonna do is chop this onion. I’ve also got some garlic, what I’m gonna do with it?

Chop it and they are going to go in the pot. I’ve got it heating up to medium high and when that’s hot, I will put a little tiny bit of olive oil in here and then sauté these guys one at a time till they soften. Sounds good? Sounds good to me!

Once the onions and the garlic have a bit of chance to cook then you can add your rice. Any type of long grain brown rice is fantastic. Basmati is a rice that is long grain so if you have some of that, that’s brown go for it and I just wanted to show you this my friend Mary had the wonderful idea to make a little cloth bags that we can use for bulk food which if you’re like me I buy a lot of bulk they come in very handy, you can avoid the plastic.

So I’m gonna take a cup of rice, put it in here, stir it around and let it toast just a little bit to bring out the nutty flavor of the rice. Now a note on these bags, they are breathable so when I store my rice I just bought this rice but when I store it I store it in a glass jars so I use jars from coconut oil or whatever type of food I buy and store them in there because you don’t want your rice to be breathing, it will absorb any kind of flavors or stuff in the air and it can lose its nutrients to the air so once I’m done with this I’m gonna put it on a glass jar.

Rice is looking nice and toasty, I can hear it crackling down there just like rice crispiest so it’s time to add the liquid and I’m gonna put the greens in first because they look kinda big and I don’t want to overflow my pot now in the greens I put half a cup of water, about half a cup of coconut milk. I just used half a can which is a little bit more than half a cup but that’s ok.

So stir this around, make sure the rice gets off the bottom otherwise it won’t incorporate into the liquid so normally we do two to one for rice for liquid to rice and so I’ve got about one to one here plus the liquid from the grains but I had measure out a cup and a half of water before I started, I’ve used have so I can do about a cup here.

Like I said I just want to make sure I don’t overflow the pot, so stir this around, bring it to a boil and then once its boiled you turn it down to simmer for about forty five minutes, the rice will cook. It will be lovely and you will have some gorgeous Mexican green rice. You can serve this along with some vegetables, some beans, whatever you like or you can have it just on its own.

This rice is now cooked, looking excellent. There’s quite a bit of liquid in here, it’s more like of a pie style with lot of liquid than the rice than the dry type of rice.

The last thing I’m gonna add in here are some fresh chives that I’ve chopped up. You can save a few to sprinkle on top make it a little pretty. Look how pretty and green that is, makes me wanna take a bite out of it.

You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.