Rice Salad

Before I start on my post, I want to thank you all for the beautiful comments left yesterday. I really do feel quite overwhelmed, but very grateful. Thank you.

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This is the first of my weekly home cooking recipes.  I'll make up three new categories - recipes savoury, recipes sweet and recipes drinks.

This is a quick summer salad I made up last week. It's a good size for four people but you could make a smaller portion just by scaling down the ingredients - it would make an excellent lunchbox lunch too. It's a good recipe to have on standby because if you're busy, you can do it in stages and just put it together at the last minute. Use whatever vegetables you have on hand. I used onion (I put onion in everything), green onions, a can of corn, frozen peas that I'd cooked in the microwave for four minutes, finely diced celery and capsicum and diced cucumber. If you want a spicy version, add a pinch of chilli flakes.

The basis of the salad is rice. I used white rice because I wanted to add turmeric to make yellow rice, but any grain will do. You could use cooked barley, bulgar wheat, couscous or quinoa. The first step is to wash your grains and cook them.  Boil in salted water for about 15 - 20 minutes. When cooked, pour them into a colander and allow that to sit until you need to use it.

Above: the prepared vegetables with celery salt and pepper. 

I buy Atlantic salmon fillets from Aldi. They're from Norway, they're snap frozen in portion sizes and I think they're a very convenient way of providing fish for the table when fresh fish here is too expensive. I pan fried three portions to serve four people. When the fish is cooked, leave it with the rice for later.  If you don't want to use the salmon fillets, tinned salmon, tuna, diced ham or roast meat would be good too. You could make a vegetarian version by using boiled eggs instead of the fish, or a vegan version by using just the grains and vegetables.

All you have to do now is to cut up your vegetables, flake the fish and mix it all into the rice.  I made a light lemon dressing for ours but you could use any dressing you like or have in the fridge.  About ½ cup will do, pour it over, add salt (I used celery salt) and pepper and it's ready to eat. I hope you enjoy it.