Colorful Rice

It's Christmas week, and I had planned holiday themed dinners to celebrate the season.

On Sunday I made a dish from Dr. Esselstyn's book called Colorful Rice:

Colorful Rice
Makes 6-8 servings

1 very large or 2 smaller portobello mushrooms, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
2-3 tablespoons Bragg's Aminos, or lower sodium soy sauce
16 ounce package frozen peas, or mixed vegetables
4 cups cooked brown rice (about 2 cups uncooked)
chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons chopped pimentos

Combine mushrooms and onions in a non-stick skillet or wok and stir-fry about 5 minutes, until soft. Add the Bragg's plus water, if needed.

Add frozen vegetable and continue to stir-fry until heated through.

Add rice and cook a few more minutes. Add parsley and another teaspoon of Bragg's according to taste and top with pimentos.


Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
Caldwell Esselstyn and Ann Crile Esselstyn
page 235

My changes:

Because I'vw been slowly adding different foods back to my husband's diet that are known to aggravate gout, instead of a full cup of portobella mushrooms I used 2 small cremini mushrooms, a.k.a. baby bellas.

I swore I bought a bag of frozen petite peas at the grocery store in the morning, but when I reached into the freezer for them when preparing dinner they were nowhere to be found. My husband found the receipt and nope, no peas. I had an open bag with a cup of peas taken out of it in the freezer, so used that plus some country style frozen veggies to make up the lost volume. It would have looked much more festive with just the peas and pimientos - red and green - but it wasn't to be. If only I had leftover green beans, instead.

I did my usual 2 1/2 rice cooker cups of rice and mixed grains for this, just as I did in a few previous recipes.

No fresh parsley at the store that looked decent enough to buy so I used about 2 tablespoons of dried parsley flakes. I should have used way more.

Last, but not least, I used a whole 4-ounce jar of sliced pimientos. Two tablespoons just got lost in the mix and I wanted the red and green color combo to pop.

See why I preferred all peas?

It tasted okay, but a little on the bland side, even with those 2 sodium-heavy tablespoons of Bragg's. Next time I'll sauté the onions (minus mushrooms) in just a bit of water or broth and we can add any soy sauce or Bragg's at the table for more flavor at a fraction the cost in sodium.

My husband and I each had 2 fairly large bowls of this and finished the whole recipe's worth of food. We're both big eaters, especially my husband, now that he's fully recuperated from his CABG and his body wants to return to its pre-op weight. Maybe if it had more mushrooms it would be more substantial.

But no more mushrooms for this family. After almost 3 weeks of being symptom-free and a uric acid level down to 5.9, well into the low part of the normal range, a few hours after eating this meal my husband's toe started throbbing again. It's not red and swollen, so my son and I are wondering if it was just the power of suggestion, knowing that the dish contained a microscopic amount of mushrooms, but he said it was still hurting him this morning, even after taking a colchicine tablet last night, as the doc directed him to do at the first twinge of pain. So much for the doc's instructions to add those foods back in to his diet. The same day he saw the doc I put a wee bit of nutritional yeast in the dish without his knowledge and there was no complaint. I added a quarter cup of beans to a gigantic pot of tomato soup, and no complaint. I find it hard to believe that the ingestion of one mushroom triggered another flare 2 hours after knowingly eating it. Most likely it was either the yeast or the beans finally making their way through his system and causing a reaction, but to be safe, it's back to none of the known gout-triggering vegetable foods. Good thing I didn't stock up on any of them and only bought a total of 6 mushrooms. The rest I'll cook up and toss in my own lunches.