From my personal collection - beans and rice

I recently read this article on favourite meals that you don’t serve to guests. We often have pasta for dinner with a sauce made with any vegetable in the fridge that is on its last legs – usually involving onions, garlic, tomatoes, chilli, capsicum, zucchini, carrot, celery, silverbeet…the list goes on! I don’t like wasting food, plus it always makes a quick, yummy meal on a Friday night. Often we have this pasta sauce by choice too and not just to use up the last of the week's vegies! However, while I love my crazy pasta sauce, it’s not something I would serve to guests – I guess it feels a bit “thrown together”.

So here’s another recipe from my ‘private’ collection! If I told you where I got this recipe from, you would probably laugh and close down the page before reading it, so I won’t (not until later anyway!). This is a dish that I find very comforting – a relatively healthy, quick, weeknight meal for my husband and I – often with leftovers which are good for lunch the next day. And no, I wouldn’t serve it to guests – but that’s just me!

This is the basic recipe I follow - although when I made it last night I also added celery in with the onion and green beans with the capsicum and a big handful of spinach for the last minute or so too.

150-200g chicken breast or thigh, chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
1-2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1/2 jar of hot tomato salsa
3 ripe tomatoes, chopped
1/2 green capsicum, chopped
1/2 red capsicum, chopped
large pinch of dried thyme
250g red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
200g basmati rice (or any white rice is fine)
2 cups water
tabasco sauce to taste

Heat a medium pan over medium heat. Cook chicken pieces in a small amount of olive oil until cooked through and golden. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add a little more oil to the pan and cook onion and garlic - cook for a few minutes or until onion is translucent. Stir in salsa, tomato, capsicum, thyme, kidney beans and rice - cook, stirring for 30 seconds.

Add water to pan and stir. Cover pan and simmer gently for 10 mins - adding more water if necessary. Stir in cooked chicken pieces and tabasco sauce and simmer for another 5 mins or until rice is cooked

Serve topped with chopped parsley if you like.
Serves 3 people

It’s the addition of the salsa that I was worried about when I first made it – but now I love it!

Recipe adapted from: Weight Watchers Single Servings Cookbook (Did you laugh? So I’m not always the foodie I pretend to be (!), but I think it is the best cookbook published by WW in Australia – lots of family friendly food and the servings are easily multiplied for more than one serving).