Punch Bowl Rice

Warning – The contents of the “Interesting Fact” section at the end of the recipe may come as a shock!

Once after a party I had leftovers in the punchbowl. Now, punch bowl leftovers are the easiest to use, drink them up over the next couple of days. This punch that got leftover had a lovely red color to it and while storing it away in a smaller jug a couple of ideas to use it ran through my mind.




1) I could have glassfulls of the delicious punch for the next two days with my meals. 
2) I could pour it down the drain since most of the soda from it was already gone. 
3) I could use it as a base for some recipe.

It isn’t everyday that I have leftover punch so I decided to go for option 3. A quick search on the internet revealed a lot of pork roast recipes cooked from the liquids that I had used to make the punch (cranberry cocktail, apple juice, ginger ale, ice and spices). But I needed a vegetarian recipe and that too before I lost all interest in the jug lying in the refrigerator.

Necessity is the mother of invention and I can’t stress enough on how true it is in the kitchen. I came up with this punch bowl rice recipe purely on the logic that rice being my “favoritest” food in this whole world, the chances of the experiment going wrong went down considerably.

And did I mention that all you have to invest is 10 minutes of your time in the kitchen if you have a rice cooker handy.

Ingredients

Brown rice – 1 cup

Black Beans – ½ can

Diced Carrots – ½ cup

Diced onion – ¼ cup

Diced celery – ¼ cup

Minced garlic – 1 tsp

Diced tomato – 1/3 cup

Diced green bell pepper – ¼ cup

Punch liquid – 3 cups

Fajita seasoning – 1 tsp

Oregano – ½ tsp

Butter – 1 tsp

Salt

Pepper

Soak the brown rice for 1 hour before cooking. In a large skillet heat the butter and cook diced onion for a couple of minutes, add garlic and cook some more. Add all the vegetables and sauté for 5 minutes or so. Add the brown rice and the seasonings. Mix well and transfer everything to an electric rice cooker. Pour in the liquid and mix again. Select the “cook brown rice” setting, relax and enjoy the aroma!

Alternatively, cook the brown rice in the punch liquid before hand and add it to the sautéed vegetables. Mix well and serve.

Serving suggestions

·         With soup and/or chips.

Tips

·         You can use white rice in place of brown rice, just don’t soak it beforehand.

·         You can use any kind of beans from the pantry; red, black or even white.

·         Sprinkle some cheese before serving for added flavor.

·         This rice would make for an excellent filling in any kind of Burrito or Enchilada.

  Interesting fact

·         A punch is an assortment of drinks generally containing fruit or fruit juice.

·      This drink was put together first in India and brought to England by the sailors of the East India Company.

·       The word punch is from the Hindi word “panch”(five) and was originally made with five ingredients; alcohol, sugar, lemon, water and tea or spices.