Puer's Spanish Rice

Ingredients

• 1 cup brown rice (prepared)
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons salsa or 2 oz diced tomatoes
• ½ teaspoon ground cumin
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon dark chili powder
• ½ teaspoon pepper
• ½ teaspoon cilantro

Instructions

First, prepare the rice. In my rice cooker, that means taking 1 mini-cup of dried rice, rinsing it off and pouring off the excess water, and placing that in the rice cooker with 2 mini-cups of water. Additionally, I put in about 1 teaspoon of olive oil, which keeps the rice loose and prevents the water from bubbling out the steam hole and making a mess. I mix about half the oil directly in the rice, and the other half goes around the edges on top of the water.

Then mix the prepared rice with the remaining seasonings and stir very well. Rice tends to be sticky, so it make take some extra effort to get things stirred together properly.

Notes

I don't add the chili, pepper, or cilantro. Those are strictly optional, and depend mainly on what sort of salsa you are using. If you are using diced tomatoes, you'll definitely need to add extra seasonings. I personally prefer Trader Joe's Habanero and Lime Salsa, which has an excellent flavour and just the right combination of seasonings. The other advantage of using salsa is that diced tomatoes generally come in cans, and don't store well once opened. If you tried to use an entire can of diced tomatoes, that would normally work out to 8 cups of rice, which is a very large amount of rice.

I've tried this with both white and brown jasmine rice, and I find that the white jasmine rice ends up making the dish a bit too bland. If you use white rice, you might want to increase the seasonings a bit.