Certainly, there’s a lot of rice cooking this Christmas already. But here’s a list of ten ways to cook rice for something different for New Year’s Day or perhaps another Christmas rice dish.
1. If Jollof Rice isn’t your first choice already, would you consider it now? You may garnish with steamed vegetables, fried plantain, and/or salad.
2. Fried Rice: In all, fried rice is stir fried onion, green pepper, curry, and other vegetables added to rice cooked in stock. If you want your fried rice green, the secret is lots of green pepper and curry.
3. Curried Rice: Here’s a dish akin to fried rice, but without the vegetable stir fry. This curried rice recipe with beef potato sauce by Dobby’s Signature is grand.
4. Coconut Rice: With cans of coconut milk, prawns and shrimps, you’re halfway set. Remember this recipe requires fewer spices; no curry, no thyme, nothing that could mask the coconut flavor. Here’s a Calabar recipe by 1Q Food Platter.
5. The indigenous Ofada Rice is a call to feel the rich Nigerian flavor- stew made with locust beans (iru), diced beef, hot red peppers, crayfish, and ofada rice. Here’s a simple recipe by Knorr.
6. Rice with Banga Stew: No rice menu spells Nigerian-and-regal like the Ofada and Banga menus. If you’re thinking local, make your list of banga (palm nuts), ugu leaves, scent leaves and assorted fish and meat.
7. Rice with Tomato Stew needs little or no introduction. The question is, will you be cooking with beef, chicken, fish, goat meat or snail?
8. Rice with Flour Gravy: You’ll need carrots, cabbage, green and red bell peppers, and green beans as salads, chunks of sausage, beef or liver, curry or brown soy for colour, and flour to thicken.
9. Rice with Salad Sauce: Like the flour sauce, here is every vegetable you can think of on a salad list cut big and cooked in thin spiced broth. Unlike the flour sauce, don’t add flour or any thickening agent, and you may add to your salad big chunks of fresh tomatoes.
10. Rice with Beans Sauce: Cook brown beans and beef till soft, separately. Mince or cut cooked beef into sizeable chunks (you may use corned beef instead). Just like you’ll prepare any other sauce- fry onions in hot vegetable oil, with pepper, tomatoes, stock cubes, and spices, then add the meat, then the beans. Add the water from the beef stock then brown soy sauce to darken.
Get your recipes from 9Ja Foodie, Knorr.ng, Dobby’s Signature, Dooney’s Kitchen and other choice food sites.