Today we’re going to talk about more simple meals for if you’re learning to cook, just starting to cook, or if you just need something really simple for dinner. Last time, we talked about using potatoes and pasta as the base of meals. In this episode, we’re going to talk about rice and a few other ways to start a simple meal.
Something that I forgot to mention is that of course, you can cook your potatoes in an air fryer if you have one. That’s definitely the simplest, quickest way to do it, and it will make the potatoes nice and crispy, but the oven works too.
Firstly, let’s talk about how to cook rice. Take a cup of rice and two cups of water – you want a one to two ratio, so if you have one cup of rice, you need two cups of water. White rice is easiest to start with because brown rice takes longer. You also need a pinch or two of salt, depending on how salty you like your rice, and a small or medium pot.
Start by rinsing the rice under cold water. Just put it in a strainer or a sieve and rinse it for a little bit. Swish it around, and then let it drain. This will remove some of the starch so that it’s not too sticky when it’s done. Once you’ve rinsed the rice, dump it into the pot and add the two cups of water. Then you’re going to add a pinch or two of salt – up to half a teaspoon. You should probably start with less the first time you try to make this, and then figure out what your sweet spot for salt is.
Then you should turn the stove on high and let the water come to a boil. You don’t need to mix the rice; you can just let the water boil. As soon as it’s done, turn the stove all the way down to low, as low as it can go, and cover the pot with the lid. Then just let it cook – don’t touch it, don’t worry about it, and especially don’t lift the lid. Wait for eighteen minutes, and then turn the heat off completely, and leave it covered for another five minutes to finish steaming. Then you can open the lid, fluff it with a fork, and enjoy.
If you stir it while it’s cooking, it can get gummy. If it gets burnt, perhaps it’s not low enough after the boiling. If you want to add more rice, just use any amount as long as you do one part rice to two parts water, and obviously add more salt if you’ve got more rice. Having your rice ready is a good start. You can cook up some rice, put it in the fridge, and use it for your meals.
One of the easiest meals with rice is stir fried rice. For this, I like to use a pan, and cook the vegetables first, then the egg, and then add the rice. By the way, this works for rice noodles as well. If you pour boiling water over some rice noodles and leave them to soak, you can substitute them for the rice in any of these things.
Start with a pan, and then chop some zucchini and onion very finely. Those will take about the same amount of time to cook. If you’re cooking something like carrot, it’s going to take longer. Zucchini, onion, and even mushroom all take a short amount of time to cook, especially with a lid over them. It helps them to steam.
Chop up a little bit of onion and zucchini, and put those into the pan. Add a bit of oil like coconut oil, and then put a lid over. Every now and then, lift the lid and stir the vegetables around. We want to lightly brown the onion and zucchini. When those are cooked, you can scrape them out. You don’t want them to get overdone, so put them on a plate while you wait.
Now your pan is ready for the egg, so put in some beaten egg. You want to take maybe two eggs, beat them up with a fork, and add a little bit of milk, or leave that out – it’s not vital. Add a tiny bit of salt and pepper, or if you like, chives to your egg, just as if you’re going to make scrambled eggs. Beat them with a fork or a whisk, and then pour it into the pan. The pan shouldn’t be too hot, as it’s going to cook very fast. You can just turn the stove plate off and use the residue heat from cooking the onion and zucchini.
Spread the egg out, swirl it around, and as it starts to cook, add back in the zucchini and the onion. Then add in the rice and stir it around. You’ll get that lovely cooked egg effect in your rice. You can add more salt if that’s necessary, or you could add a little bit of soy sauce or tamari to taste. There’s your stir fry meal. You can add lots of things into that.
You can add some leftover chicken. By the way, I forgot to mention last time that if you want to have shredded chicken on potato or with pasta, if you don’t know how to cook your chicken breasts, just order a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Get a rotisserie chicken that’s already cooked, shred that, and put it in your fridge to add to your meals in the week. You can add it to potatoes and to rice.
Chicken is a great thing to add to your stir fry rice. Before you add it, add a little salt, and possibly some soy sauce, or any kind of Chinese style sweet and sour sauce, to your chicken, and mix it up. Do that in a bowl before adding it to the stir fry rice.
Obviously if you’re looking for simple meals, bread products are very helpful. There’s rolls, buns for burgers, sourdough, and other breads. You can use these for things like grilled cheese. Pita breads and wraps are also great to use. If you’re using wraps, then you can use a cooked rotisserie chicken again. You can add some fresh salad ingredients like tomato, cucumber, and lettuce, as well as some mayonnaise or sweet chili sauce, and that’s all you need.
If you’re doing grilled cheese, it’s great to have a combination of cheeses. Lay out your bread in matching size slices if you’re using an uneven loaf. Then you can grate something like mozzarella, cheddar, or jack cheese, and add a little bit of salt. Also, putting butter on the outside of the sandwich helps them to crisp up. You can cook these on the grill, in the oven, or in the air fryer.
It’s usually pretty easy to find ready-made burger patties and meatballs in the grocery store. Burger patties are very easy to cook. You can use some shop bought barbecue sauce and a little salt and pepper and season them, and then cook them on the grill or in the oven.
Let’s talk about meat. If you have potatoes or rice as a side, then you can have some kind of meat with it. Plain meat is usually pretty easy to cook. I mentioned in the previous episode how to cook your chicken in the oven – put it into a glass dish without a lid. Add a little olive oil, and then some seasoning. Thyme is always good for meat and fish, and add some salt, a little bit of onion powder, and some other herbs like oregano, rosemary, and et cetera. You could add a little lemon juice, to make Greek style chicken.
Another way you can cook chicken, besides putting it in the air fryer, is in a pan on the stove. This works best if you cut it up because a chicken breast or thigh can be quite thick in the middle. You can either cut up the raw chicken and then cook it in the pan, or you can cut it up as it cooks. It’s sometimes easier to cut it up then rather than to do it when it’s mostly cooked. Just be careful that you don’t scratch your pan. We like to use wooden or bamboo implements, and once the chicken is mostly cooked, you can even cut it up with the end of the bamboo implement.
A good kind of chicken to try to make is sesame stir fried chicken with noodles. Like I mentioned before, you can use very thin noodles or ribbon rice noodles and cook those just by pouring boiling water over them and leaving them for about 10 minutes.
Then you would cook the chicken in a pan. Put oil in the pan, season the chicken with salt, a little pepper, and some onion powder. As it cooks, chop it up, and then at the end, add a little drizzle of honey, a little bit of soy sauce or tamari – just a splash or two – and some sesame seeds. That’s delicious! Then take your chicken out of the pan and cook some stir fried vegetables.
You get packs of stir fry veg at the grocery store. It’s Julienne style with zucchini, butternut, and some greens – that kind of thing. They’re already chopped and good to go, so you just tip the package into your pan. Add a little olive oil or sesame oil, which is very nice, and some more soy sauce or tamari. Put a lid on as it’s cooking – that helps it to soften. It takes about ten minutes to cook. At the end, you might want to drain a little of the liquid out.
Then add the chicken back to the mix, add your softened noodles, and mix that up. You might want to add a little more salt and a little more soy sauce at the end just for taste. That makes a really good stir fry. It’s great to keep in the fridge for a few days, and it’s delicious.
Lastly, there’s the meatballs. If you can buy ready-made meatballs, they’re easy to cook. You just brown them in a pan. Put a little oil like coconut oil in the pan, heat it up, and then put your meatballs into the pan. Gently shake the pan back and forth so that the meatballs move slightly. You want to brown them.
Then you should fry a little onion. Chop an onion very finely and cook it in the pan. Add everything back to the pan, or to a pot if the pan isn’t big enough. You can add about a cup of beef stock, and then cook the meatballs. They have to simmer. Don’t put them on boiling, but just below. Then you can add some yoghurt for Swedish style meatballs, or you can add tomato sauce. It depends on which way you want to go. Add about a cup of yogurt or a cup of tomato basil mix, or any kind of tomato puree.
Then just gently let it cook. If the liquid isn’t covering the meatballs, you might want to add a little bit of water, but not too much, because you don’t want the sauce to be too thin in the end. Then you can cover it, keep it on a low heat, and let the meatballs cook in the sauce until you’re ready to serve them with the rice or whatever side you have. Potatoes work great as well for this, and even spaghetti. I’ll put that recipe at the bottom of this post because it sounded a little complex.
I hope this has given you some ideas. I hope you’re going to try cooking something you’ve never cooked before, and that you’ll find it easy. If you want to ask me anything, it’s karyn@familyfoodformoms.com.
