Broken Rice Salad

I am not normally a fan of wild rice. It's chewy and reminds me of brown rice which I'm also not normally fond of. Brown rice reminds me of eating raw tofu. Which isn't unlike eating chalk. But local grains are hard to come by and I really felt I should try the local wild rice I found here. It comes in two varieties: regular and broken pieces. The broken pieces are less expensive so I bought some of those, also thinking that they might cook up more tender if already broken.

I was not disappointed. I still prefer white Basmati rice to all other rice, but I won't be buying more of that for a long time. (I still have about a cup of it left in the pantry which I'm saving for a rainy day.)

Due to my very circumspect approach to my blog which prevents me from telling you every little detail about me, you probably think I'm a real skinny minnie and have no clue that I am trying to mend some serious cheese inhaling habits which have caused me to expand in the middle quite a bit. You will probably be shocked to know that I am trying to cook some foods that have a slightly lower caloric punch than grilled cheese sandwiches. (Look, just play along, would you?)

This warm salad is what I made for dinner last night and it was both delicious and satisfying, so I'm going to give you the recipe too. You can use unbroken wild rice as a substitute, but then you can't call it "broken" rice salad.

Broken Rice Salad

Ingredients:

2 cups cooked broken wild rice*
4 large carrots chopped
10 Brussels sprouts cleaned and halved
2 med. Yukon gold (or similar) potatoes diced
2tbsp vinaigrette
bottle of favorite dressing**

Steam all the vegetables until tender. Most of them take about five minutes. Test them with a fork to see if they are ready. Put them in a large bowl together and pour the two tablespoons of plain vinaigrette over them. Stir them up to coat with the dressing. The point of the plain vinaigrette is to keep your vegetables from getting dry if you don't eat all the portions of this meal right away.

Add the two cups of cooked broken rice to the bowl and stir well.

Divide into four portions. In each bowl add two tablespoons of your favorite bottled or home made dressing and stir gently. Eat. So good.

Serves 4.
336 calories per serving.
7.5 points per serving.

To reduce the calories or points even further you can try using only one tablespoon dressing on your individual serving. Personally I think that would be madness, but you must be the judge.


Also, if anyone else who is struggling to shed some pounds needs some moral support, please come join me and some friends at our new blog "The Fat Ass Water Cooler" where we are going to try to inspire each other to meet our goals. The main topic of that blog will obviously be weight loss, being fat, and how to change our unhealthy habits into healthy ones. So if you find that talk tedious, don't visit.



*To cook my wild rice I heated a tablespoon of butter in a big sauce pan, then put 12 oz of the rice in the pan and stirred it often for about five minutes on medium high heat until my kitchen smelled like cooking hay, then I added 36 oz water to the pan, turned up the heat to high until the water was boiling. At that point I turned the heat down to medium low and with the lid on the pan let the rice simmer until done which took about 30 minutes. The rice is done when the hulls open up and the rice is tenderish. Let's be honest, wild rice never gets truly tender.

**I used "Riverhouse" Feta dressing that is made by a local company and is a creamy vinaigrette with herbs, feta, and kalamata olives. You can use a plain vinaigrette on this recipe and chop up a little bit of feta and olives if you can't find a similar bottled dressing. But be careful how much you use if you are hoping to keep the caloric value the same.