Here are three quick ways to make plain rice into beautiful, delicious rainbow rice. An early reader, Charles, said he loves rice with vegetables, but these treatments work for grains other than rice as well—everything from quinoa to barley to farro. Vegetables are a great way to liven up the usual rice and beans.
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Casseroles are a great way to stretch your cooking-without a-recipe muscles. As one reader, Carolie, reminded me, they require little prep time, yield many meals, and the leftovers are easy to store. Casseroles also let you easily tailor an existing recipe to your own tastes.
So here’s my adaptation of one of Carolie’s favorite casseroles, itself a play on cabbage rolls, a traditional Eastern European dish that is delicious but labor intensive. This version is a good way to use up leftover rice or grains and lentils.
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There are many ways to make tomato sauce. While there is a time and place for the longer cooking and more complex sauces, I rarely find those times! This simple version is almost always what I make. This tomato sauce is boldly tomatoey and works on just about anything. It also takes 5 minutes to make. Can’t beat that. Keep reading
I’m away this week on vacation, but I wanted to keep bringing you some tasty summer meal ideas. Here’s one of my favorite, super simple summer pasta dishes from Good and Cheap: Pasta with eggplant and tomato. It’s mid summer so you should be able to get eggplants for a relatively low cost, and you can either grab a can of tomatoes, or make this with fresh tomatoes if you can afford them. Tomatoes are so sweet and delicious right now! The sauce for this pasta cooks in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta. I made it recently and doubled the recipe and it kept very well in the fridge. Keep reading
