The human body is high maintenance. We need to breathe air, drink water, not get too hot, not get too cold, not get hit by a truck, and eat food every single day.
I wouldn’t mind eating once a week for enjoyment, but every day–multiple times a day–is too much. Who has the time for this, especially once you add in food prep time?
Hubby used to tell me if I ever found a brown goo that fulfilled all my dietary requirements I would live on it.
Well, good news!
I’ve invented the perfect recipe for people who can’t be bothered with cooking and don’t care about gourmet eating. It takes 5 minutes to prepare (10 if the curry powder’s fallen down behind the flour again and takes a while to find), it’s cheap, nutritious, and it actually tastes okay.
It’s so easy anyone can make it, and you can use almost anything you have on hand.
Too good to be true? Just watch.
Note you will need a microwave rice cooker (currently $20 from Amazon) and a microwave.
Step 1: Rice
Add 1 cup of brown rice. If you don’t have a measuring cup, it doesn’t matter. Use a small mug.
Fancy types of rice work too, but sort of defeat the purpose of simple and cheap.
Step 2: Beans
Add a 420g tin of beans (that’s a normal sized tin), including the liquid.
You might have questions, like, ‘what sort of beans?’. Nearly any question you can think of, the answer is, it doesn’t matter. Whatever sort you like or have. Chickpeas work too. Or tinned lentils (I imagine).
Why beans? They have lots of nutritious stuff in them and they make you feel full. Lots of protein, if you’re concerned about such things and, despite rumours to the contrary, not at all poisonous.
Step 3: Veges
Add vegetables, about 2 cups. Any sort work, but I recommend whatever’s in your fridge about to go off. This works as a disposal system for unwanted leeks, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, Chinese vegetables, and anything else you can think of.
Mixed frozen vegetables are easy, and you don’t even need to defrost them.
If your veges come in large pieces, cut them up to the size you want to stick in your mouth.
Step 4: Seasoning
Add seasonings. I use a tablespoon of curry powder and one vegetable oxo cube. (I don’t know if America has those, but it’s a cube of salty vegetable stock.) Crumble up the oxo now or you’ll have to stir lots later.
If you have herbs, fresh or dried, throw in some of them too.
Optional step 5: Other stuff
Add other stuff, like mushrooms. Not the poisonous ones, and cut them up first.
If you eat meat, add bite-sized pieces now.
Step 6: Water
Add two cups (or mugs) of water and stir. Try not to get it all over the bench.
If there’s still room in your rice cooker, you might want to add some more vegetables.
Step 7: Cook
Put the lid on your rice cooker and microwave it on high for 30 minutes while you go away and do more important things, like pretty much anything.
Don’t worry, it will be there whenever you get back, and will probably still be hot. But open a window or put on an extractor fan before you go, because it makes a lot of water vapour.
Step 8: Adjust if necessary
Give it a stir and see if the rice is still hard.
If the rice is soft, eat.
If it’s hard and dry, add half a cup of water and cook 5 more minutes.
And if it’s hard and wet, cook 5 more minutes.
Repeat if necessary.
Enjoy!
Hubby charitably calls this ‘rice risotto’, which it isn’t, but you can probably live on it. It serves 4, especially if you add a piece of toast, and lasts several days in the fridge before the rice gets too hard.
You’re welcome.
Do you have a favourite minimal-effort recipe for when you need to eat but just can’t be bothered? Care to share?
If you subscribe to my blog I may never send you another recipe, but you’ll get to read all the random other things I post.
As a fellow author this sounds perfect to me. Unfortunately I don’t have a microwave and won’t be having one anytime soon.
Ah, too bad! Perhaps the same thing would work if you boiled a pot on the stove? Or poured it in the toaster? 🙂
Sounds okay to me but I could no more get this recipe past my husband than I could persuade him to . . . I’m trying to think of something that would be harder to get him to do than eating beans, or kale, or most of the stuff in this concoction. But it’s okay because he does almost all the cooking. And I love to eat, so I have nothing to kvetch about.
Darn it, that’s where I went wrong! My hubby is getting better, but he never really learned to cook. Unfortunately, neither did I.