I used to like cooking this rice dish when I was still staying with my parents. The original recipe (I cannot remember where I plugged it out from – it was more than ten years ago!) called for the rice to be cooked in a rice cooker. It was therefore convenient to dump all the ingredients into the cooker and leave the rice to cook neatly.
Now that I’m trying to cook this dish for the first time at my own house, without a rice cooker, it is a little bit trickier. However, given that this is a great rice dish to have anytime, as well as that I have a huge cast iron pot sitting at home, I have no excuses for not doing so at all. So here is an attempt to replicate a dish from a decade ago, using the same ingredients but with a different set of kitchen utensils. I must say, it tasted as delicious as it used to be. Yummy!
Ingredients:
- Butter: 2 tbsp
- White onion: 2, diced
- Rice: 6 cups
- Leek: 3 large stalks, leaves removed, sliced
- Chicken curry powder: 4 tsp
- Roasted cashew nuts: 200g, halved
- Water: 6.5 cups
- Chicken stock cube: 3
- Salt: 1 tsp
- Saffron (optional): a pinch
- Raisin: 200g
- Chinese parsley: 1 stalk, chopped
Method:
- Heat butter in a cast iron pot. Fry onions till softened.
- Add rice. Stir to mix and coat with butter.
- Stir in leeks, curry powder & cashew nuts.
- Add water, chicken stock cubes, salt and saffron.
- Leave to simmer for 10 min, uncovered.
- Stir in raisins. Leave to cook for another 10 – 15min, covered with lid.
- Leave to rest for 10min. Garnish with parsley to serve.
Tricks:
- To save yourself some effort, get the roasted cashew nuts straight off the shelf at supermarkets. Shake off the extra bit of salt before adding them into the rice. I prefer these to the baked ones as they are tastier and add to the fragrance of the rice too.
- This would be an easy treat if you have a rice cooker at home. Just dump all the ingredients into the rice cooker (except for the raisins) and leave the rice to cook for as long as the cooker says stop. Add in the raisins after that and voila!
Disclaimer:
- I’m not very sure where I got this recipe from. This could easily make for a good rice dish befitting a Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Indian theme, depending on what other dishes it complements!
Serving:
6 – 8 persons
