Wife-Safe Copycat Rice-a-Roni

So, to start, I will apologize for the story before the recipe.

As various members of my family can attest, I love Chicken Rice-a-Roni.  There were never leftovers of this when I was growing up.  And when I was living with my aunt and cousin in Kentucky, I had it regularly.  It was great when it would go on sale for 10 boxes for $10

A great quick meal is to make it by instructions and include a chicken breast during the cooking.

My wife and I have shifted our diets to maintain our lifestyle, and so to reduce the salt and other processed ingredients, I went looking for a copycat recipe. It turned out to be a great keyword as I found this recipe for Copycat Rice-a-Roni.

A more recent problem that's developed is that my wife has developed an intolerance/allergy to certain foods.  The more dangerous ones are onions garlic, and capsaicin.  So we took out the garlic and onion powder from the recipe.  Still was still having problems, so I did some research.

Do you know why chicken bouillon is yellow?  It's because they add turmeric.  Would you expect that the turmeric plant produces capsaicin?  It was certainly a surprise to us.

So the next step was to make our on chicken broth.  Now, this is just cooked chicken-backs from the butcher that cooks for a few hours.  No seasoning.

Now, you'll notice that this takes a lot of seasonings away.  So I decided to use my old default seasoning blend which I call my Scarborough Faire blend (🎶 parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme 🎶).

Now, we've upped our rice intake, so we needed an easy way to make rice without buying a rice cooker.  Truly the last thing we need is another thing to sit on the counter all the time. So my wife found this rice recipe on the Listening Method.

So finally, below is the recipe.  This will have my method using our chicken broth, so if you're using bouillon/granules, just follow the instructions on the packaging.

Ingredients:

1 cup short grain white rice

¼ cup vermicelli (mini-spaghetti)

1 cups chicken broth

1¼ cups hot water

1½ Tbsp. butter (I use unsalted. If you use salted butter, reduce the added salt below)

1 Tbsp. miso paste

1 tsp. parsley (ground)

1 tsp. sage (ground)

1 tsp. rosemary (ground)

1 tsp. thyme (ground)

1 to 2 tsp. salt (to taste)

 

Steps:

In a Pyrex measuring cup, pour in 1 cup of chicken broth.  Mine is thick to gelatinous, so I don't use full strength, and instead add 1¼ cups of boiling water from my kettle.  Stir in the miso paste until it is mostly dissolved.  The boiling water will heat up the mixture and help the miso dissolve.

Put all seasonings and salt into a small bowl.

In a pot, melt butter in pan on HIGH heat.

Pour in rice and vermicelli.  Stir to coat with butter.

Let rice and vermicelli partially brown, stirring occasionally.  It's not all supposed to be browned, just enough for some color variation.  Keep an eye on it the butter doesn't burn.

When the rice and vermicelli is sufficiently browned, stir in the seasonings.

Give the chicken broth a final stir, and then while wearing an oven glove, pour in the chicken broth mixture. Immediately place lid on pot.  I wear the glove, because the liquid will start to boil almost immediately, so you don't want to burn yourself.

Allow to boil for 4 minutes.  Do not remove lid.

Reduce heat to LOW for 15 minutes.  Do not remove lid.

Raise heat to HIGH for 30 seconds.  This will dry off the bottom of the rice.  Do not remove the lid.

After 30 seconds, turn off the heat and move the pot off to a cool burner.  Do not remove the lid.

Immediately before serving, you may now remove the lid and fluff the rice.

Serve and Enjoy.