Happy Meal Prep Sunday Everyone! Recently I have been getting a lot of messages regarding my diet. Questions like, what do I eat? How do I find time to meal prep? What kinds of foods do I meal prep? How often do I meal prep? How do I come up with meal ideas for the week? And of course, one of my favorites…Can I get the recipe for that? So I decided to try to start sharing recipes and meal prep ideas and info more frequently! So here is one of our weekly staples! It is a healthy spin on my mom’s famous Baked Rice Recipe from when we were growing up.
Often times people hate changing from white or jasmine rice to brown rice because of the texture. Brown rice is a whole grain so it doesn’t get as soft and fluffy as white rice or jasmine rice does. So, I would like to share with you the way we cook our brown rice for meal prep to get it closer to the fluffy and soft texture of white rice.
Oven Baked Brown Rice
Step One: Measure out your servings of dry brown rice based on how much you plan to eat for the meal or week, and dump into a medium sized mixing bowl.
Step Two: Add water to the rice, in the mixing bowl. Typically the amount of water you use, should be whatever you would use for the ratio to what you measured for dry. So if the box or bag says 1 cup of rice to 1 cup of water add a cup of water to the mixing bowl. Make sense?
Step Three: Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and “forgettaboutit”. Lol. No but seriously, just let the rice soak up the water! Give it 1 to 3 hours. You can stir the rice after an hour to see if there is any water left in the bottom of the bowl. Again I don’t have an exact time because it depends on how much rice you make. I have set this up on a Saturday night, and didn’t cook the rice until about 11am the next day.
Step Four: Once the rice has absorbed the water and you are ready to cook it. Wash and chop up a red or orange pepper into small pieces (Picture shown).
Step Five: In a small frying pan, put 1 tbsp of olive oil and a tsp of minced garlic. One the garlic is fragrant add in the chopped pepper and stir gently to coat. Cook the peppers about five minutes or so.
Step Six: Preheat the over to three hundred and fifty degrees, set to bake, and position the oven rack to the middle of the oven.
Step Seven: Dump the sautéed peppers into the mixing bowl with the rice and stir to combine, add some seasoning! I typically use garlic powder, onion powder, a little salt and black pepper,and sometimes parsley flakes… Stir to combine.
Step Eight: In a square baking pan (like the one you use for brownies, I use usually a 9×13) dump the brown rice from the mixing bowl and spread evenly.
Step Nine: Slowly add water or chicken broth/stock to the rice. Same amount that the recipe calls for but now we are adding it to the rice to actually cook it. Chicken broth or stock will be saltier and add more flavor, but some people think the seasoning is enough. So it’s really whatever you prefer.
Step Ten: Cover the pan with foil and bake in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes. Until water is absorbed and rice is soft and fluffy.
Step Eleven: Remove from the oven (turn the oven off). Remove the foil from the rice and let cool. If you want to add a little butter or butter substitute to the rice to prevent it from getting sticky when chilled, now would be the time so it melts. We use 1 tbsp usually for 2 cups of rice.
Step Twelve, transfer the rice to a mixing bowl, stir it and taste it. If it needs more seasoning now is the time to spruce it up! 🙂 Remember that spices and herbs are packed with flavor, and don’t hurt the diet. Go easy on the salt and butter though.
Step thirteen: Transfer the rice to plates or containers.
Step fourteen: Mainly because I didn’t want thirteen steps…. Enjoy! 🙂
