Comfort Rice-Dish

As we were sampling the beet salad, we had "Bounty Rice" baking in the oven.

There were several variations of this recipe. The one I originally meant to try was cooked on the stove. However, it called for sour cream and we'd used all of ours in the dilly bean soup. Below this variation was a "Cajun" version made on the stove without sour cream. The variation I opted for was essentially the same as the original, minus the sour cream, & baked in the oven.

This dish may not sound like it, but it is usually served with Italian flavors. Tomatoes, garlic, basil, oregano, & mozzarella. The recipe calls for beef or pork, and since we've had the perfect amount of beef sitting in our freezer for a few weeks now, I opted for that.

On a tangent, we are not vegetarians. However, we find meat is often an extra cost and we love vegetables. For example, for this week's groceries we spent our same weekly budget for groceries. We came away with, in all seriousness, five more bags of groceries than the week before. So much of it vegetables!

So this is just to say, I like this book because most of the recipes don't have or are light on the meat & dairies. I would take it a step further and say that in most cases these recipes could be easily adapted to a vegetarian or even vegan lifestyle.

The recipe did not call for fresh fennel, though some of the recipes up ahead in the book do. I think I would like to try this dish with the fennel next time and also with Italian sausage in place of the beef. Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself...

This dish was amazing. Definitely a comfort food for any cold night. It was like lasagna, only with less cheese, less meat, rice & Brussels sprouts!

Really the recipe called for cabbage not Brussels sprouts. We had some of the sprouts left over from a good sale a few weeks ago where we picked up four pounds of the little cabbages. Cabbage would have been much easier to prepare for this dish. I opted to use what I had, in the spirit of this cookbook, but would generally find the cabbage more practical.

I am so glad to add this dish to my list of foods to snap together & dig into when there are troubles or coldness in our world.

Favorite Song (on my favorite radio station during prep time): Steeleye Span- Captain Coulston