Spanish Rice with Beef

ok guys here is one of the recipes I promised you! Hopefully I can find my camera charger this weekend and I will be able to add pictures of everything.

Spanish Rice with Beef is a recipe from my childhood. My mother had joined a church based diet called First Place and it was from their cookbook. I really had forgotten how much I enjoyed it until I made it again.

Full Recipe found here: Spanish Rice with Beef

How I followed the recipe:
I used extra lean ground beef and cooked that with the onion. I actually had forgotten to buy the bell pepper this week at the store so I left it out. I couldn't taste a difference but if you like bell peppers than add it!

The recipe calls for 2 cans of stewed tomatoes. Just to give it more flavor for one of the cans I used Mexican Stewed Tomatoes and one can regular. I suppose next time I might use both cans of Mexican Tomatoes but I was worried about it being too strong. Stewed tomatoes are still whole (well the ones I got anyway) to break them up a bit after you take the lid of the can you can take a sharp knife and just cut in the can a few times. The first time I made this dish as an adult I noticed it looked different than I had remembered as a kid. I called my mom and she told me she had always pureed the tomatoes in the food processor first because as kids my brother and I would not eat chunks of tomatoes. So if you have a picky eater this may help. ( Kristi? :) hehe. )

Next is the rice. I was trying to be more healthy and used brown rice. After a half hour as the recipe states I still had almost raw crunchy rice. I let it go another half hour and it was still a little crunchy. So if you would like to use the more healthful brown rice I suggest either precooking it some or just know you are going to cook this dish for like a hour and a half. According the the points tracker on the WW website they are both the same number of points. So next time I will probably use regular rice and get my fiber dosage elsewhere.

The rest of the recipe is herbs and seasonings. I did add some salt and pepper to my beef and onions as they cook. You should always season well as you go as opposed to waiting until the end. I used cayenne for the "red peppers" it mentions. I just use the Rachel Ray method and "eyeball" my seasoning amounts and I tend to go a little heavy since Mat likes things really seasoned.

Since one of my main focuses right now is making sure my portion sizes are correct I actually measured how many cups this made. I got 6 cups cooked. Per the recipe builder each cup is 6 points. I like is served with a little light sour cream. YUM.

Wow that was a lot of explanation for an easy dish.I'm betting this even could be converted to a crock pot receipe...hmm something to think about!