Green Rice

So, I won’t eat cauliflower rice. I just won’t do it. I love rice too much to substitute it completely away.

When I was in Edinburgh recently, I hit up Dishoom (a favourite Indian of mine, with loads of chains in London) and had the most delightful broccoli, pistachio, mint and chilli salad. It was intense and perfect with a skewer of delicately spiced chicken (and a huge pile of garlic naan).

I will re-create that salad one day, but for the meantime I got to thinking how good a side of broccoli was with curry/spiced food. And how maybe I could bulk out rice with some nice greens to easily increase my vegetable consumption. The great thing about this is the versatility, you could easily bulk it up further by adding pistachios and some sliced chillies.

So I decided to throw in what I had on hand - some random spices, shredded broccoli and peas into some cooked rice and see what happened.

The majority of the ingredients

What happened was deliciousness. See below.

Serves 3 easily, 2 with some leftovers, or 4 if you have other sides

Ingredients

• 1 cup of uncooked basmati rice
• 6 broccoli florets (give or take)
• ½ cup frozen peas
• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tsp mustard seeds
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• pinch ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp sesame oil (optional but delicious)

Method

Cook the rice according to packet instructions.

Meanwhile, chop the broccoli and place in a food processor. Blitz for 30 seconds or so until you have thinly diced broccoli (not mush). If you want you could saute this briefly in a little butter (and omit the oil later) but I find the hot rice takes the crunch out of the thinly shredded broccoli.

Cook the frozen peas according to package instructions.

Once the rice is ready, take it off the heat. Pour in the spices and stir.

Then add the broccoli, peas and sesame oil and mix well.

Serve with whatever you fancy!