health kick

It's a start. At least it's brown rice. Granted between dressing the rice salad and marinating the chicken I used almost an entire bottle of Italian dressing. But it was a pretty giant bowl of salad, so I figure that the fat spreads itself out pretty well.

This is a concoction that I came up with to approximate a semi-healthy lunch that I used to eat at the Pita Grill with my BBC peeps. Now there's a Pita Grill on 8th Ave right near my current job, but my homemade rice salad is so satisfying that I don't feel the need to go get it. There really aren't too many components to this salad - brown basmati rice, cucumber, red onion, golden raisins, crumbled feta cheese, and Italian dressing. For some protein, I marinated chicken breasts in the same dressing, then threw them on a grill pan, sliced them up, and threw them on top. For lunch today, I'll just eat the salad with no chicken.



The interesting thing about this dish, for me at least, is that the golden raisins and the feta cheese go so well together. As far as a recipe goes, I didn't measure anything, but I'll throw together some approximations after the jump:

Brown Rice Salad with Feta and Golden Raisins

Ingredients
(all of these amounts are approximate and should be adjusted to taste)
2 cups uncooked brown basmati rice
1 medium cucumber, diced, about 1 cup
1 small red onion, about 1/3 cup
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/3 cup Italian dressing

Preparation

Cook rice according to directions, adding a tbsp of butter or olive oil to keep grains separate. When rice is cooked, set aside to cool while you prep the other ingredients. In a large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients and toss to distribute the dressing. Serve at room temperature or cold. Grill marinated chicken, fish, steak, or tempeh as an accompaniment. Makes a giant bowl.