I make rice a couple times a week, usually, but never plain simmered rice. The flavor and texture of pilaf style rice is too good to ever go back to eating plain. You might be wondering where the little ‘pilafs’ are in my rice but as it turns out, pilaf refers to the method of cooking the rice. All it involves is sauteing your rice (or other grain) in some sort of fat with seasonings before adding your liquid and simmering until done. It is just a lot more flavorful and I like that I can change up the seasonings to compliment whatever we are having for dinner.

Tonight’s Cajun style dinner had bold seasonings so I opted for roasted garlic since it is roasty tasting and strong enough to stand up to the flavors of Cajun food. As with all of these recipes, you can change up the flavors and ingredients to make it your own! Just use these as a base. So let’s talk about this method.

The pilaf method is great because it takes little to no extra time to prepare because even if you dont feel like chopping any veggies, the simple addition of dried herbs will make a huge difference. At most, youre talking about dicing some onion or mincing some garlic. It is definitely worth it to me! So I minced some garlic up and tossed it in a small pot with about 2 teaspoons of oil on medium high heat and cooked until lightly browned.

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Next, I added the rice and seasonings. I use long-grain rice for the flavor and it doesn’t get soggy very easily, in my opinion. Whichever rice you use, make sure you follow the ratio of water to rice on your package. My rice is 1 cup of water to 1 cup of rice so the recipe will have equal parts water and rice. Stir the rice to evenly coat with oil. Some of the grains will start to look an opaque white at which point you can add your water (or stock if you want), cover, and reduce heat to simmer until done which is usually around 18 minutes for my rice.

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Then just fluff and serve! I served this with red bean étouffée and Cajun spice roasted vegetables, as you can see.

The rice really enhanced the other flavors! This is a staple recipe in my house so I hope you get as much use out of it as I do. Enjoy!

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