Hi! I'm Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we are making Spanish rice and this is sometimes called Mexican rice. I'm making it to go along with a Mexican salad dinner that we are going to have later. I'm planning to do Burrito so you might want to look and see if I actually get that accomplished today. If I do, I will have my Spanish rice to serve with it.

I want to show you about a wonderful quick and easy recipe I have for you. I’ll start with rice and I’ve talked about that in just a minute and I'm going to have that already or I’ve got to cook for you but you will prepare four cups of rice. And then for the—being you can just skip over this, this is optional. If you don’t want chopping, then you could just leave this out. But if you want to add this in, it makes a richer fuller recipe and it is less about open the can or get the package or something like that. So it’s a richer, fuller recipe and it’s a little bit tastier so you might want to do that. In case you did, I thought I would do mine that way.

But just remember, rice and then you could skip down here and then you can use salsa for your flavoring. And let me see I'm going to have the salsa. I’m going to put in and then some seasoning promo pocket cacao seasoning and then this is black pepper salt, salt and pepper to taste and then just stir it together and heat it up again. This is already hot but it will have cooled down when you add these things so maybe five minutes or so in the stove cup and it’s done. So, it’s a very easy recipe if you take out all of the chopping and the sautéing that comes in here. So, let me start with my wraps. I use minute rice just to make this a very simple recipe. I wanted four cups of cooked rice so I used two cups of the minute rice and two cups of water. So, I’ve brought the water to a boil on a cooktop. Two cups of water boiling, I put two cups of the mezzo rice in it or the minute rice in it and then I turned off the heat. Put a lid on this and then I just let it set since then. And it has been five minutes at least. I think it says five minutes. So now, I'm just opening it at the first time and you can just flatten it with the fork and it will be perfectly cooked.

So, if you are a little nervous about cooking rice and you are not sure you are not going to get that perfection, you’re afraid maybe it’s going to be crunchy like not done enough or it’s going to mushy, too done then one option is to use a minute rice. But I'm using it mainly just to make this really easy for you.

Now, I'm going to go ahead and explain and do the sautéing and then we’ll come back with our rice. I have an onion here but I only use about half of an onion this size and I’ll put that into my kitchen chopper and it’s finally chopped. So, what I'm going to be doing with all of this is going to skillet and I'm going to be putting some olive oil in the skillet about one tablespoon or maybe one and a half. You want to be able to get it to have good contact there so we’ll put our onion in. Remember this is about one half of a large onion and it is finely chopped. And then let’s move to the next vegetable. This is green bell pepper and I have used slightly less than one half, maybe one third. It depends on the size of pepper you get. If you get smaller than this then use half of it but this one just kind of extra large as well as the one I was working with.

So, if you have a kind of large green pepper, then maybe a third of that. It is not exact anyway chopped fairly fine, just add that in. And next comes the red bell pepper, same thing, if you have a very large one then maybe a third. If you have something this large, you don’t need half of it—half of it. But go ahead and chop that up and add that to the mix. And these are beautiful colors and eventhough how that thing is going to be reddish from the sauce that we have here, this little bit of green—is nice and I think you’ll enjoy this version if you try it. The last vegetable I have to sauté is a garlic and I’ve just picked up a clove about this size so that I just kind of smash with my hand on the counter and then I took a pan knife and cut it into little minced pieces.

So, this is going to the cooktop and we are going to sauté this. And when I come back, we will be ready to finish up this recipe. I finished sautéing my vegetables so I'm going to bring them over and provide them with the—and you can say that the color has changed. It’s a much more muted but you do want to sauté this thoroughly because this is the only time they get cooked. From here, we will be adding some things and then we will heat it back up. We will just warm it but we will not boil it so we need to get all the cooking that you want done to those peppers and onions and garlic. You don’t want to have raw onion or raw garlic or crunchy peppers in here. So, it takes about five to 10 minutes to get this at this point but you need to go to that time and trouble so that it will be properly prepared.

Alright! So now, this is a nice addition to the rice but our main components are going to be salsa and our flavoring. This is just any kind of salsa actually in the store that I go to, just their house brand two cups. You could have homemade salsa. I have shown you how to make salsa. If you want to go to that trouble but it will be a long day of cooking if I were doing a Mexican meal and I started out with making everything like salsa backhand.
So probably what I'm going to do is add a two cups here and then this will actually I brought out of the refrigerator because I was chilling it to use on my meal. What’s left here will be used as salsa with chips. So, you can think about what you want to include in your meal as you are making your preparations and sometimes things over that nice thing like that. So, that will be going back to our refrigerator. So, let’s add our cacao seasoning. We need one tablespoon of immigrant—of cacao seasoning. Again, it’s just in the grocery I go to at house brand. You need to season with salt and pepper just to your taste. The rice was not pretty seasoned. I didn’t solve it at all so I'm going to give them a good shaking of salt and then just a little bit of ground black pepper on the top.

And we have all the ingredients in there so let me stir this around. I’m going to see what we have. I love it, it’s different now but remember I'm going to put this back on the stove and I'm going to be just heating it until it is warm all the way through. I'm not trying to cook anything and you really should not boil it. So, mixing here is the most critical thing so that you get all of the flavors blended properly. And then basically, this is the look of your Spanish rice. Now, I will be serving this with my other dish that I'm making today if I finished my Burritos. So, if you happen to look at that, you will probably see what this looks like on the serving plate but it’s going to be a very nice dish.

This is what your Spanish rice will look like. And you can see, it is really nice when it has all those extra visuals in it so you really decide where you would like to do the quick and easy way which is just to add salsa and seasoning and salt and pepper and you are done if you use the minute rice or you can use your regular rice and then all of these vegetables and have this extra cup color and flavor a bit. This is the look you are going to get. I hope you like it.