The nice thing about steaming vegetables and serving them with a minimum of seasoning, is that the pieces of vegetable retain their individual flavours.
If you already have some left over cooked rice, here's a tip for speeding up the recipe: Put the cooked rice on top of the steaming vegetables two or three minutes before they are cooked. The rice will heat through nicely. To serve, hold a large plate, upside down, firmly over the sieve and turn everything over quickly. Lift off the sieve and you should be holding a plate with vegetables on top and rice on the bottom.
Ingredients
A piece of pumpkin
2 courgettes
1 carrot
1 green pepper
2 cups of rice
A heaped dessert spoon of flour
A dessert spoon of oil, butter or margarine
About a third of a litre of milk
50 -70g of hard cheese
A little grated nutmeg
A few crushed black peppercorns
A couple of pinches of dried basil
Salt
Put the rice in a pan with 3-and-a-little-bit cups of water and some salt. Stir once to separate the grains then bring to the boil. Stir once more, turn the heat down extremely low and cover the pan. The rice will take about 20 to 25 minutes to cook and by that time everything else will be ready.
Peel the pumpkin and carrot and core the pepper. Chop all the vegetables into rough pieces, making the carrot pieces smaller than all the others. Put the vegetables in a sieve (strainer) and sit on a wide pan containing some water. Cover the vegetables with the lid from the pan and bring the water to the boil. Steam the vegetables for about ten minutes on a medium heat.
While the vegetables are cooking, gently heat the oil, butter or margarine in a sauce pan then add the flour. Stir the resultant putty-like lump around vigorously until it starts to break up and take on a more crumbly texture. Add the milk and continue to stir until the mixture boils. It will start to thicken at this stage and if it seems too thick, add some more milk or a little water. Turn the heat down low to simmer the sauce gently and add the grated cheese, black pepper, nutmeg and salt. Let the sauce simmer until the cheese has melted, then turn off the heat.
Spread the rice on large plate. Spread the vegetables on top of the rice and sprinkle them with dried basil. Pour the cheese sauce over everything and serve.
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