Today I want to talk about my mother’s Spanish rice,
… which we briefly touched on it in my podcast with her. It’s just such a wonderful, versatile, recipe and but it’s good to take anywhere. It’s good to take to a potluck, better if you can plug a crockpot in.
We start out with one diced onion and one diced bell pepper, (yellow if possible), and you can see by the photos that I used a red bell pepper. I don’t like green, but traditionally it’s made with a green bell pepper.
Next you have one and a half cups of dry rice, Uncle Ben’s. It does make a difference to use Uncle Ben’s with the texture, the way the excess starch is probably already taken out of it. It keeps the grains nice and whole.
To start cooking you take a couple of tablespoons of oil, put it into a pan, then saute’ up the onions and the bell pepper. And when they’re translucent, maybe a little brown, I add the cup and a half of Uncle Ben’s rice, and then sauté the rice so it gets coated with a little bit of the oil. You can see that they start getting a little translucent also. So maybe for one minute or two minutes.
And then I add a pound and a half of ground beef. I add pepper, garlic powder and season salt.
So now we’ve got dry rice, hamburger meat, bell pepper, and onion. And then I drain off the fat if there is any. Then I add a 32 ounce can of Hunt’s tomato sauce. Once again, I’m calling out brand names because I feel it makes a difference. Some tomato sauces are too sweet for me. So I do that and then I add a can of petite dice tomatoes, this is what’s different than my mom’s. I usually use Hunt’s if that’s what they have, sometimes S & W, and then I put that in. Stir it all up and then you put it on low, simmer for about 20, 25 minutes and it’s perfect. And that’s it.
So the ingredients are:
Two tablespoons of cooking oil,
One onion,
One bell pepper,
Pound and a half of ground beef,
One cup and a half of Uncle Ben’s rice,
1 – 29 ounce big can of tomato sauce,
1 – 18 ounce or a normal size can of petite diced tomatoes.
Perfection – Please try it!
