Rice

Thai-Style Sticky Rice

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

If you’ve eaten at a Thai restaurant, you’ve probably had sticky rice. In many parts of Southeast Asia (Laos and Northern Thailand, for example) eating with your hands is still totally cool, and sticky rice is how they get the job done.

Sticky rice is also referred to as “glutinous rice” but that doesn’t mean it has gluten – it simply refers to its glue-like texture. It can also be labeled as sweet rice or mochi rice. It also comes in short or long grain varieties – the rice I used is short grain.

Read Full Article

Nasi Goreng (Indonesian/Malaysian Fried Rice)

Today’s recipe is a quickie, mostly because I’ve written so much about fried rice already. Regardless, I though it was time to introduce nasi goreng (“fried rice” in Indonesian/Malay), one of my favorite fried rice dishes, to the world.

Nasi goreng is different from other fried rices in that it uses shrimp paste/powder (“terasi” in Indonesian, “belacan” in Malay, and could be labeled as either in the store), chilies, and a little palm sugar. The result is a taste that is pungent, spicy and sweet all at the same time. The traditional recipe uses “kecap manis” – a sweet soy sauce used in Southeast Asia – but I think that there’s enough sweetness in the palm sugar alone so I stuck with my tamari/aminos combo.

Read Full Article

Breakfast Fried Rice

This is a recipe borrowed from my father-in-law, who often uses breakfast foods as the base of his fried rice. I thought I would take it a step further and make this a breakfast-centric dish, while also retaining the bacon grease to fry the rice.

I should mention that although I use the word “wok” in this recipe, we actually use a Calphalon 12″ Chicken Fryer which has a larger bottom and can fry more food at once.

Read Full Article

Let’s Talk Rice

Rice is a continuing source of debate in both the online world and my own. Sites like the Perfect Health Diet encourage rice as a “safe” starch, and other Paleo/Primal folks like Mark Sisson consider it okay provided everything else is going well in your diet. However, most Paleo dieters shun this gluten-free food due to its high glycemic index and label as a “grain”.

For the first couple weeks after starting the Paleo diet I was feeling great, with more energy than I had felt in years. And then I totally crashed, and was more tired than my usual constantly-tired state. I felt that it was probably because my body had run out of fat to burn (I was getting scarily skinny), and I just couldn’t eat enough fat to keep my body going, even after reintroducing dairy fats like butter and cream. So I reintroduced rice and potatoes in limited amounts, and felt great again. But then I felt guilty, that I wasn’t being “orthodox Paleo”, so I started to cut them out again. This time I tracked everything I ate through myfitnesspal.com (great food tracker, btw), and cut my total daily carbs down to about 40g a day, almost all of it from veggies and some fruit. My tiredness returned in full force. In comes rice again (100-150g of carbs/day, the Primal Blueprint maintenance range), and I feel great again.

I may experiment with my diet again in the future, but for now, I’m sticking with rice. I simply can’t eat enough fat in one day to keep me from shrinking to near-starvation levels on a carb-free diet. 100-150g of carbs from rice and potatoes seems to make me feel the best.

In celebration, here’s how I cook basmati rice on a stovetop (we have a nice Zojirushi rice maker, but basmati never comes out right).

Read Full Article