Maggie Rice

Let me start this post with a riddle. What takes 2 minutes to cook and yet is one of the hardest leftovers to use? 

And the answer is MAGGI !

I bet most of you never faced this problem because Maggi noodles are consumed faster than they are cooked. I would have never faced the leftover situation with this delicious instant noodles had it been just me eating them. I cooked a lot of them for a group and well, some of them were on diet! So here I was, with a bowl full of cooked Maggie noodles lying in the pan and a tummy so full, it refused to have any more of them.

The first thought that came to my mind was to just throw them away; of course wasting food is never an admirable thing to do. I remembered, Hemal Shah, a friend of mine had mentioned that she cooked rice with maggi masala (the seasoning packet that comes with the noodles) and her family just loves it.  I figured if the seasoning could be used for another recipe why not use the leftover Maggie, which already had the seasoning in it. I called my friend who willingly shared her recipe. Adding a few more ingredients, I had this utterly delicious Maggie rice for dinner and now I know what to do with leftover instant noodles and after reading this post, you will too!

Ingredients

Cooked Maggi noodles – 1 packet

Cooked white rice – 1.5 cups

Yellow bell pepper (chopped) – half a cup 

Diced green chilies – 2 small ones

Diced ginger – 1 tsp

Finely chopped garlic – 1 tsp
Turmeric powder - 1/2 tsp
Red chili powder - 1/2 tsp

Garam masala – ½ tsp

Olive oil – 2 tsp

Salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a skillet and sauté the yellow bell peppers, green chillies, ginger and garlic on a high flame for about a minute. Add the rice, noodles, salt and spices and mix well. Lower heat and cook for a couple of minutes till the flavors blend, stirring all the while. Sprinkle cracked pepper and serve hot.

Serving suggestions

·         With Chips/ Papad/Yogurt

Tips

·         You can use any color bell pepper to make the dish more colorful.

·         The ratio of rice to noodles doesn’t really matter too much when you are using leftovers!

·         Go easy on the green chilies if you can’t tolerate spice.

  Interesting fact

·         Apart from India “Maggi” is also very popular in Malaysia. 

Spinach Tortilla in Yogurt Sauce

This recipe is a westernized version of a Gujarati dish called “Rotli nu Shaak” made from leftover chapattis. So if you take out the spinach tortilla and use leftover chapatti or roti and add thick buttermilk which I have presented in the name of “yogurt sauce”, you will be eating a Gujju dish start from my mom’s kitchen.

Also, this is a real quick fix, just the perfect amount of time one wants to spend on using up leftovers!

Ingredients

Spinach Tortilla – 2 medium

Chopped onion – ¼ cup (optional)

Yogurt – 3 tsp

Water – 1.5 cups

Curry leaves – just a couple

Green chilies – 2 medium

Sugar – ¼ tsp

Red chili powder – as tolerated

Turmeric – ½ tsp

Cumin  Coriander powder – 1 tsp

Mustard seeds – ½ tsp

Asafetida – a pinch

Salt – add carefully

Blend yogurt and water to form a smooth sauce (buttermilk) and set aside. Cut the tortilla into medium sized pieces.

Heat oil in a skillet and add mustard seeds. When they crackle, throw in asafetida, green chilies cut into small pieces, chopped onion and curry leaves. After a couple of seconds, pour in the yogurt sauce and add in all the remaining ingredients except for tortilla pieces.

Cover the skillet and let the liquid cook with the spices for 5 minutes. Ease in the tortilla pieces thereafter and mix well. Cook uncovered for 3 minutes or so on high flame and turn the heat off. Cover and let it rest for a couple of minutes before serving so that the tortilla becomes all soft and mushy in the sauce.

Serving suggestions

·         With Rice

Tips

·         You can use leftover roti/chapatti in place of tortilla

·        The dish tastes very good without onions too if you want to skip them like I do most of the times

·     This dish is best savored within a couple of minutes of cooking it. Unfortunately, the leftovers of this leftover inspired dish don’t retain texture or taste for a long time.

  Interesting fact

·       Tortilla has surpassed bagels and muffins and is now sold only second to sliced bread in that packaged food category in USA.

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.