Healthy Savoury Rice – Lunches for Work

Most weeks we make a savoury (brown) rice dish which we can keep in the fridge and take to work for lunch, or have handy for a quick & easy meal at home. The basic recipe is easy and healthy, and normally we’d use cooked ham or chicken as the meat ingredient, but this week I found a couple of packs of diced chorizo sausage on offer so decided to have a treat! 😉

Ingredients:

1 x celery stick, diced
1 x carrot, diced
2 x peppers, diced
1 x cup of peas
1 x cup of diced or chopped meat of your choice
Finely chopped Chilli’s to suit your taste. We like a spicy kick so use 2 or 3 birds eyes!
Half a bag of brown Rice.
Pepper to season & a couple of tsp’s of dried parsley

Method:

Cook the rice as instructed, but not for the full time on the bag as we will fry and then steam it a little at the end, put it to one side. (When the rice is cooking, I chop all the veg ready, then drain the rice and put it in a large bowl, so I can use the same large pan to cook the veg. Saves on washing up!)
If using dry ham or chicken then use a Tbsp or less of oil to cook, but with the chorizo it has enough fat in it to just get it on the heat and cook everything together. Heat the meat through and then add all the veg apart from the peas and stir fry together with some dried herbs and pepper to season.
After a couple of minutes, add the peas (even if frozen) and stir fry a further couple of minutes.
Add the cooked rice back in and stir fry for a minute before taking off the heat, putting a lid on the pan and leaving for 5 minutes to steam itself (you can give it a stir after a couple of minutes to stop it sticking). Job done! Put into tupperware boxes ready for lunches and you have a tasty, nutritious & easy microwavable lunch ready to go!

My tip for adding some more great nutrition and flavour to it as a meal is to take an egg with you to work, crack it over the top of the rice (gently pierce the yolk with a sharp knife or cocktail stick before microwaving), spreading out the white so it cooks quicker and microwave on full power for 2 minutes, take it out and spread any remaining egg white out further before finishing it off for another minute and you have yourself a yummy lunch!

Lunches at work made easy with a little bit of planning and preparation…

Paul. 🙂