As always, you can find a printable PDF version of the recipe just above the recipe title.
This week, I have rice on the brain. On Tuesday, a book I co-authored with founders of Lotus Foods Caryl Levine and Ken Lee comes out into the world. It’s called Rice Is Life and we’re super excited!
Lotus Foods is probably most well-known for the onyx-colored grains they sell called Forbidden Rice. They also import many varieties of rice from other parts of Asia. With this book, we not only want to show people how diverse rice can be but also the myriad of ways you can cook with it.
As Caryl and Ken like to say, “Rice is more than just a starchy side dish.”
Over several months, I cooked more rice and rice noodles than you can imagine! While it’s hard for me to choose my favorite rice, I did become particularly enamored with their Dehraduni basmati rice. They source this beloved Indian rice from a cooperative of organic farmers in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India along the border with Nepal.
As with vegetables, there are tens of thousands of cultivars of rice. And within the category of basmati, Dehraduni is hailed as the most fragrant. I adore its long slender grains and how it becomes gorgeously fluffy, like a pile of confetti when cooked with some fat.
To celebrate this new book, I knew I wanted to create a new rice recipe for you and one that would take some of the intimidation out of cooking rice. I had visions of snowy white fish over bright red, tomato-y rice. With a few tests, I got this to where I wanted it to be.
First, you cook the rice for 10 minutes with a combination of marinara sauce perked up with some lemon juice. (Yup, store-bought marinara is fine, and I’m partial to Rao’s.) Then you nestle in the fish, so it steams on top of the rice for the last 10 minutes. The result: A comforting one-pot meal that’s still light.
The single lemon here actually does triple duty. The juice brightens both the tomato rice and the fish. Then, the lemon zest lends its fragrance to olive oil that gets spooned over the fish at the end.
Here, the rice is a little bit soupier than it would be in a typical Indian dish made with basmati rice, like pulao. Because basmati is a drier style of rice, the grains stay separate and aren’t mushy.
I love the bright, salty, anise-like note dill brings in at the end, but I also know it requires you to buy a bunch of dill (unless you’re lucky enough to have some growing). To help you use up the rest of the bunch, I’ve made a few suggestions below. Or you can skip it or use parsley instead.
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