Recipe Spotlight: Spanish Rice by The First Year Blog

Last year, I ran across a recipe for Spanish rice by Beth at The First Year blog on Pinterest that was simply amazing. No kidding...it's awesome.  This is the recipe that you will thank me for finding and adding to your repertoire, and you won't believe how easy it is to make.

I made it the first time without the ground beef, because I served it as a side to my salsa chicken. Today I am making it with the beef to have as my main entree with a side of Mexican street corn, which I am making for the very first time and am super excited about!

As she says, start by adding a tablespoon of butter to a nonstick skillet, then add your chopped onions and cook until they are slightly browned. I actually did a full small onion because I love the contrast of onion to the rice. In the future, I will probably add about 1/4 cup of chopped green pepper as well. 

Once the onions are done, toss in your ground beef and brown it as well.  When that is cooked through, add the brown sugar, chili powder (I kicked it up a notch by also adding 1/4 tsp. of cayenne pepper), mustard and tomato sauce. Simmer for a few minutes, and then toss in your rice.

So in Beth's recipe, she calls for minute rice. I love the idea, but I really don't ever have it on hand, and I rarely ever buy it. What I do normally have on hand is uncooked brown rice and a rice cooker. 

Brown rice has a reputation of being boring and not very tasty, but I disagree! I throw mine in the steamer but I don't add water to it...I use homemade chicken broth. It's amazing! I roasted a chicken a few months ago, strained the broth from it and threw it in the freezer to use later. So while chicken broth is awesome to steam brown rice with...roasted chicken broth makes it aaaaaaa-mazing.

Simmer that for a few more minutes making sure to stir every so often, and then it's ready! It is SO good.
Also, in the vein of yesterday's post, it's really inexpensive to make! In fact, if you consider the fact that I have all the spices, broth and butter on hand which make them negligible...the whole recipe only cost me a whopping $3.91 to make. Probably even less considering I based it on the price of Minute Rice instead of plain brown rice. Seriously...you can't beat that!!

Here is her recipe. My tweaks are in parenthesis next to it.
Thanks for sharing your recipe, Beth!  We love it!

Ingredients
1/4 cup onion, chopped (I used one whole small onion)
1 tbsp butter
1/2 pound beef or ground turkey
1 tsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp dry mustard  (I used 1 tsp.)
1 1/2 tsp chili powder  (I used 2 tsp.)
1 can (15 oz) tomato sauce
1 cup minute rice (regular rice will not work because it takes too long to cook)