Happy Mrs. Monday everybody! Got some great new dishes coming your way! Let’s talk about today’s recipe. Made with couscous, this would be a more traditional North African dish. We are substituting basmati rice for the couscous. There are some very interesting flavors in this dish! Cinnamon and cloves add a nice little spice to it. Normally, I’m not a cinnamon fan. It’s very subtle in this dish.
Let’s get started!
Our list of ingredients includes vegetable stock, brown basmati rice, a cinnamon stick, whole cloves, a yellow onion, a carrot, a sweet potato, cauliflower, garlic, peas, and cilantro. A quick word about our ingredients- I gave Mr. FBBQ a list of things I needed. It was a rough list, nothing fancy, scribbled. On it, I wrote “carrot.” He took this quite literally and got me one single carrot. It was a pretty pathetic carrot too. Not in great shape. But, it worked! As far as the peas, I used frozen peas. They, too, worked just fine. Lastly, I stole the yellow onion Mr. FBBQ was planning on using in his recipe. Karma for the carrot.
There were a lot of moving parts to this recipe. To start, boil the vegetable stock with the cinnamon stick and cloves. Add the basmati rice and let this simmer until the water is soaked up. The recipe says to remove the cinnamon stick and cloves prior to eating. Good luck with that. The cinnamon stick was not a problem. Those stupid cloves are tiny and I ended up accidentally eating one later. It was not very good.
While the basmati rice is cooking, chop up your carrots, onion, garlic, sweet potato, and cauliflower. I put the cauliflower and sweet potato in the vegetable steamer to soften them up a bit. I then added the carrots, onion, and garlic to a pot and sauteed them.
Once the sweet potatoes and cauliflower were soft, I added those to the carrots, onion, and garlic in the pot. Throw some peas in there and add the rice (minus most of the cloves, or all of them if you have the patience, unlike me). Mix it all up, garnish with cilantro, and you are ready to enjoy!
