Green Mexican Rice with Corn

It’s green magic!

This week I found a treasure in my school mailbox –> a collection of recipes clipped out from a magazine with a little stickie note from a friend next to one of the recipes that said: green rice? Thank you, food blog, for letting every person in my life know that I love food and allowing them the opportunity to have a food friend who will enjoy things like clippings of magazine recipes in my mailbox. Especially when said recipes are for the best rice of your life. I love this Green Mexican Rice and it’s salty, fluffy, greeny riceyness so, so much.

Plus the corn.

Plus it goes with anything.

Say no more: bowl o’ rice, here I come.

This is not the first time that I’ve been gifted recipes, foodie articles, cooking treasures, or junky cooking treasures (that really are treasures). Totally true story: I walked into a meeting this morning and a coworker passed me a rusty, scratched cooking sheet saved out of her garbage pile. I posted about using old cookie sheets for photography on Facebook a few weeks ago and rusty, scratched cookie sheets have been showing up in little corners of my life ever since.

Sometimes recipes arrive via email, and most of the time that’s because I’ve completely harassed the sender for the recipe of the lunch that they had on the day that I was stalking their meal in the work lunch room. Not creepy at all. I just sit on my side of the table and secretly eye everyone’s lunch containers as they spoon the food into their mouths. WHO AM I.

I’ve gotten recipes as magazine clippings, cookbook page photocopies (…uhh, illegal? oh my gosh, never thought about that before), and my favorite – handwritten collections of recipes stapled together in a mini-book. Every once in a while I’ll even get a newspaper article about great restaurants or local food news sent to me via snail mail, because I have the most thoughtful in-laws in the world.

I also like to talk (as people know) and I like food (as people really know), so sometimes people I barely know will strike up a little conversation with me about the best spaghetti and meatballs they made last night and what wine to serve it with and how much garlic they put on the bread and specifically how to best reheat the leftovers. Is that the best thing to talk about or what? I love that I am targeted for these kinds of conversations.

THANK YOU, food blog life, for letting this happen to me all the time.

So here’s the scoop-de-doop with the green rice.

It’s a Mexican rice of sorts, being that we’re using cilantro and hot peppers and garlic to bump up the green flavor. The flavor is really mild, though, so if you’re going for HOTTIE hot, I would add another pepper. It reminds me a lot of Mexican rice, except it’s green. Or fried rice, but with Mexican flavors. Or the best rice ever, except THE BEST RICE EVER.

I tried to keep the oil under control while still using enough to get that great texture – the amount of oil ends up being only a little spoonful per serving and it adds so much to the rice in both flavor and texture. You saute the uncooked rice in the oil, and then you cook it up with the green spinach, cilantro, pepper, and garlic puree. It’s so fluffy and it can go with anything. Did I already say that?

Here are some ideas for serving it up:

with Grilled Chicken
with Coconut Lime Chicken
with Grilled Shrimp
stuffed in Tacos
stuffed in Burritos
sprinkled on Nachos
with Chips – been there done that
with Fried Plantains like these totally drool-worthy Garlic Tostones – similar to what you see pictured.

I see visions of this versatile, simple rice all over my summer. Pop some food on the grill, cook this fluffy Mexican rice up in all it’s green glory, make some fresh guacamole, and you’ve got yourself a shnazzy fresh summer meal. I am already so excited to make this for parties and get-together and grill outs and for meeee to eeeeat.

Coming in hot –>