Rib chop, baby portabella and baby vidalia onion rice
The title of this post is misleading, but it does bring up one of the major quandaries of home cooking: what to do with the stuff you opened up and should really use? It’s not necessarily that you have leftovers, it’s that you opened that quart of beef stock to use a cup and now you’re committing to using it somehow.
So this was precisely my problem. Having finished the cous cous last night, I had plenty of the pricey beef stock that I bought, I had some leftover green onions, some gorgeous baby vidalia onions and some baby portabellas lying around.
Since cous cous was played out, I decided to make a rice. But the key to this is to begin by browning the mushrooms and caramelizing the vidalia onions with patience.
Slicing my baby vidalia onions
Notice the size of the baby portabellas (cut in half) at the beginning of the process.
Notice the size after some quality time browning over butter and salt.
At this point I added the onions, which take less time to sweat and caramelize and made a base for my rice.
You put the mushrooms and onions to a pot, add some olive oil, and cook the rice without liquid for a minute or so.
Rice, olive oil, mushrooms, onions -- no liquid yet!
At this point we can now add the liquid, in my case the beef stock at a 3:2 ratio (3 parts water to one part rice by volume.) Note that this ratio is NOT universal to all rices, this happened to be medium-grained rice that I’m very familiar with.
Once that we bring the liquid to a boil, we can stir, cover and reduce to a simmer for the remainder of the cooking.
We pan-sear a nice pork chop in an iron skillet, move it into the oven for finishing at 350 and we have the finished product and quite the tasty lunch!
