Rice with Tomato & Spinach

A friend of mine bought me a cookbook - Marie Claire "Spicy" in return for the Thomas cake I made for her son Jeffrey. As usual, as soon as I got the book I started tagging it!!! hehehe... The recipes in this book are actually quite interesting, when I first read the book title, I thought it was about hot and spicy food. But in fact, it's a collection of recipes that uses herbs and spices like tabouleh, fish tagine, baked quinces with orange and cardamon etc etc.

One of the recipes I tagged was the 'Rice with tomato & spinach'... yes yes... the title doesn't sound very exciting, what really caught my eyes was the colour of the rice, the rich vibrant yellow colour with a dash of red from the tomato. Very eye catching indeed!

Ingredients

1.5 tbsp butter

1 large bunch of spinach, finely chopped

2 cups basmati rice

3 tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp ground turmeric

1 tsp ground cumin

1 red onion, finely sliced

2 vine-ripened tomatoes, finely chopped

3 cups of vegetable stock (I used chicken stock instead, because this was what I had at home)

1) Melt the butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Add in spinach, cover and cook until the spinach is dark green and softly wilted. Remove and set aside.

2) Wash the rice several times. In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat and add the turmeric, cumin and onion. Cook for 5-7 min, or until the onion is golden and slightly caramelised. Add the rice and stir together for 1 min.

3) Squeeze out excess moisture from the spinach, then add it to the rice along with the tomatoes and stock. Stir once, then bring to a boil. Cover for 25 min. serve with yoghurt.

Basmati rice is different to the medium grain rice I used to have, it doesn't have the stickiness to it, and it's a bit softer than the long grain rice. The rice was full of flavour mainly because of all the spices, however, not too strong though, just right!! The use of tomato helped to balance out the intense flavour from the spices. I didn't add in any yoghurt because I didn't have any at home... haha... maybe I'll try it with the yoghurt next time, the acidity of the yoghurt will probably add in an extra depth of flavour to the dish, and make it even more exciting in taste!