©Ashy Macbean 2009
I had the idea for this recipe rattling about in my head for a while before I got round to doing anything about it. It started with the title, which I saw on a menu in a restaurant in Bangkok. We were out and about, exploring the area around Wat Po and the Grand Palace - very touristy, but impressive none-the-less - and we got hungry and started hunting about for somewhere to eat. The place we found was at the end of a lane on the river bank. There wasn't much in the way of vegetarian options on the menu apart from the steamed rice with cashews and olives. I'm always on the look out for new recipe ideas and this one sounded intriguing, so I ordered the dish. But they didn't have it. And so then there weren't any veggie options and I started to get a bit irritated because I was seriously hungry. The waiter suggested that they could put together some veg fried rice and I agreed to that and made a wee note in my book to try the rice with olives and cashews when I got home.
It's an unusual mix: olives and cashew nuts. Cashew nuts with rice is something I would expect to see in Thailand, but not with black olives. I tend to think of them as belonging more to Mediterranean cuisines. So, how to deal with the combination, if I don't know what else was in the original recipe? Well, here's how my thinking went.... What's common to both Thai and Mediterranean cooking? Basil, for a start. And garlic. Two seasonings already. I decided to lean more towards the Thai end of the spectrum by including lemongrass, but bearing in mind that olives often appear with lemons in e.g. Turkish cuisine (lemon, lemongrass... who's fussy?). To cut a long story short (or maybe it's too late for that) I made up my own recipe to fit the title and it maybe completely different from the one in Bangkok, but it came out very well and deserves a place in my veggie cookbook. So, here it is.
Any long grain rice will do for this. I suppose Thai jasmine rice would be an obvious choice, but I used Malabar rice because that's what I had.
Ingredients
1 mug/glass of rice
A handful of black olives
A handful of cashew nuts
A few small cloves of garlic (whole, unpeeled)
3 or 4 pieces of lemongrass
(fresh or dried)
A few basil leaves or some dried basil
Olive oil
A little salt
Heat a little olive oil in a deep pan and fry the cashews and garlic cloves for a minute or so - until the nuts start to toast. Add the rice and stir and cook for a few minutes more then add 1.6 mugs/glasses of water, the olives, the lemongrass and some salt.Stir once and let the mixture boil.
As soon as it reaches a boil, turn the heat down very low, stir and cover the pan tightly. Cook for about fifteen minutes - until all the water has been absorbed and the rice is soft. Remove from the heat and gently fluff up the rice with a fork. Add the chopped basil at this stage, cover the pan and leave to sit for five minutes before serving (that'll give you time to put together a wee salad).