Soupy Rice with Chicken and Vegetables
I have been looking forward to trying this new recipe from Food & Wine since it was featured a couple of months ago in the same issue - on the same page, even! - as this incredible stir fried black rice.
I actually had thought of making this a while back, even going so far as inputting it in my Fitbit dashboard back in January, but I got distracted by shiny things and other cravings. Then, lo and behold, the craving this week was for olives and peppers. Done and done.
Planning!
As I put together the nutritional info in my Fitbit dashboard, it became clear that the full recipe would make way more food than I needed for four portions (not a huge surprise, considering the recipe states that it feeds 10!) so I played with proportions and decided to halve it, and only use 2 tbsp of olive oil. I don't have an enameled cast-iron, but rather use a non-stick dutch oven for recipes like this, so I thought I could get away with it. Spoiler alert: I did.
I dropped in an additional last-minute modification when I decided on my last day of work last week that I wanted a nice cold martini with an olive when I got home. I popped out on my dinner break to a grocery store and hit up their olive bar for some nice castelvetrano olives marinated with hot pepper oil (don't judge!) and got enough to fold into this stew. Knowing the olives would be spicy, i decided to skip the pepper flakes in the recipe.
Here's the nutritional breakdown from Fitbit...
Groceries I had on hand...
- olive oil
- salt
- pepper
- adobo
- onion
- garlic
- tomato paste
- bay leaf
- rice
- frozen peas
Groceries I had to buy...
- chicken thighs (1.4lb @ $4.49/lb = $6.29 - note that I took a little of this for the samosas that I also made this week)
- red bell pepper (.49lb @ $2.49/lb = $1.22)
- chicken broth ($.79)
- olives (.41lb @ $12.99/lb = $5.39)
- cilantro ($2.49)
Total monies spent for the entire recipe: $16.18
Total monies spent for each of these 4 meals....
$4.05 per meal
Cooking!
As I had hoped, this was easy as pie (yes, pie is easy). It's a perfect one pot dish. Here's how it went...
At the time I'm finally putting together this blog post, I have already eaten this three times this week, and it is excellent. It stores well: there isn't much extra liquid for the rice to continue soaking up, so it doesn't get gluey. But it reheats beautifully, the chicken staying tender and the veggies releasing just a little extra liquid to re-soupify everything. I love the olives that I picked. And I did portion some fresh chopped cilantro to drop on top after reheating, and it absolutely does bring the whole dish together. I will look forward to making this again and again!
