I check 101 Cookbooks every day for a new recipe, even though I figured out the pattern of how often they are posted. Sometimes there are recipes that I am just not interested in, or there are sometimes posts that aren't recipes at all. I find myself constantly waiting for something new and exciting to be posted - unless the most recent recipe is the perfect recipe for me. The current Pineapple Rice recipe had me from the picture. It is an amazing sounding taste of Hawaii.
After collecting the ingredients, I finally had time to make this last night for dinner. I have to admit that this recipe took me a very long time. I usually don't remember to keep track of time, but this took me about an hour. I used brown Basmati rice, which was delicious and smelled so wonderful. The dressing was pretty easy to make, although there were a lot of components. (Luckily, it was worth it.) There was also chopping and toasting cashews, chopping scallions and shallots and pineapple, and the tofu, which I never got around to. The recipe uses seitan, but I am not familiar with that, nor did I have it on hand, so I intended to use tofu. Unfortunately I did not think of it soon enough and it was still defrosting when everything else was done, and I just couldn't wait!
One addition I made to this recipe was chopped pineapple. Two reasons for this: one, it is Pineapple Rice and the only pineapple is in the dressing, which felt just so wrong to me, and two, I used a 20-oz can of pineapple and needed only 1 cup for the dressing. I chopped it up pretty small, so it melded in nicely with the rest of the ingredients.
I would recommend serving this dish hot. For one thing, my rice was already pretty hot since I had just cooked it, and it also makes it feel a little more substantial. I kept the rice in the pot after it had finished, just mixing it around a bit, and added the dressing and the rest of the ingredients in with the burner on low just to heat it up.
The final result was absolutely delicious and I am already dying to make it again. The recipe suggests trying a fried rice version with the leftovers, so I forced myself to save a little so that I could try it. (That may be another post.) I make a lot of things, but this is something I am going to include in my regular rotation for sure.
I made a variation of this - pineapple & ginger fried rice with tofu. To make even healthier I used Kashi pilaf instead of rice, which has great grains and even seaseme seeds. It was delicious and the more firm Kashi was a nice juxtaposition to the soft tofu. Thanks for the idea!
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