by Ethan Johnson
March 11, 2004
If you all have recovered from your spastic laughter that was brought on by my posting of the Plain White Rice recipe last time, then you're undoubtedly ready for something a tad more sophisticated.
The following recipe will be there for you forever, through thick and thin. Even if everything else is crashing down around you, you can take comfort in knowing that there's always going to be:
Mushroom Rice
Note: Originally seen at AllRecipes.com, however the quantities of key items were messed up. My recipe is accurate. Nyah.
1 1/2 cups white long-grain rice
3 cups water OR chicken stock
4 tbsp butter
2 or more cloves of garlic, minced
2 green onions (scallions), finely chopped
8 oz. mushrooms, diced
Serves 4, as a side dish, or 2, for dinner.
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This time, we will break from tradition and not take a moment to gaze mistily at our most supreme Le Creuset™ cookware (even though we got more), and instead, pause to survey the majority of the ingredients we will be using today:
Yes, that's our new Santoku knife. Yes, I'm shameless!
Get 2 bowls ready: One for the stuff you're going to cook with, and one for the leftover scraps.
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We begin by cleaning, and chopping, the mushrooms.
I have been using a damp paper towel to wipe the mushrooms off before chopping them. Use your preferred method.
Chop off the stems, and then cut the mushrooms into 5 slices horizontally, and then cut the slices once vertically. You will have pieces that look like this:
Dump the chopped pieces into the "good" bowl.
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Wash the green onions and cut the tips off of each of them.
Chop them up into fairly thin pieces and dump them into the bowl with the mushrooms.
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Finally, gather up the garlic you plan to use. As shown below, I use quite a bit. It ends up being more for the smell when everything is sauteeing as opposed to the finished product. Meaning you won't reek of garlic breath after you eat this. That's reserved for something more hardcore like Shrimp de Jonghe.
Chop the ends off of each garlic clove, peel, and run each clove through a garlic press. Scrape the pressed garlic into the bowl containing the mushrooms and green onions.
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This concludes the prep work. Take the "garbage" bowl containing the scraps and general waste and make one trip to the trash can.
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Heat up the pot you will be using over low heat, and add the butter. Here's a neat trick: If you are using Land O Lakes™, cut a stick in half and drop it in the pot. If you are using foo-foo stuff like Celles Sur Belle butter (as used in today's example), and you got the really small bar (175 grams, ish), then cut that bar in half. If not using a stick form of butter, then measure out 4 tbsp (ish, don't get all Nuclear Physics about it) and melt in pot.
Here is the butter, melted thusly:
Raise the heat to medium.
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Empty the contents of your "ingredients" bowl into the pot. Stir the mixture frequently to keep things humming along.
Here it is after 5 minutes. Not much to see in this picture, but just in case you were wondering what it will look like:
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Add the rice, and shake up the pot to coat the rice with the rest of the ingredients. It should look like a "patty" or something, pulling away from the sides of the pot.
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Pour in the chicken stock OR water. I originally used water whenever I made this, then I tried chicken stock one day and found that it really "kicked up" my plain ole rice. So I extend this option to you, the reader.
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Bring the pot to a boil.
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Reduce the heat to "lower than low". This part was lost on me in my bachelorhood. All those rice packets and whatnot always said "low heat", so I set the stove burner to "low". Wrong. Lower than low. For those of you with a gas stove, it looks like this:
For those of you with electric stoves, I don't know what to tell you, as electric stoves seem to differ from model to model. So all I can offer is, whatever "lower than low" means on your stove, set it to that.
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Cover the pot, and set the timer for 18 minutes.
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After 18 minutes, uncover, fluff, and serve.
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Cha Ching!
Enjoy! Let me know how it turns out. <EM>
