Asparagus Cashew Rice Pilaf

This is a great meal that's easy to prepare and it sure beats a greasy cheeseburger any day of the week. Hold on! You're about to learn how to make your own Rice A Roni - the "basics" of this recipe can be used when you don't have a box handy.

First things first though. All your slicing and dicing needs to be done and out of the way.

Trim and cut about 1/2 pound fresh asparagus into 2" pieces. Dice about 1/4 cup onion. Slicing and dicing is done. That wasn't too bad was it?

Melt about 2 Tbsp butter in a large skillet I use Smart Balance Lite with Olive Oil. Then take some spaghetti noodles and break them into small pieces. Think Rice A Roni here when you're wondering how small to break the spaghetti. 

It's hard to explain how much spaghetti - I generally use what appears to be 1 1/2" across when I hold the noodles all together. Give or take. Just guesstimate. 

Stir the spaghetti around to get it coated with butter. Brown as you would Rice A Roni. But keep in mind that spaghetti noodles do brown quicker than Rice A Roni so keep an eye on it.

Add your onion and about 1 tsp of minced garlic and cook for about 2 minutes. Just long enough for the onion to get tender. 

Can you see my "ooopsss!" moment? Lesson: don't measure over what you're cooking. As you can see, this is waaaaay more than 1 tsp of minced garlic. Ooopss! Like I didn't already learn that lesson when I was about 13 or so. Silly me. I went ahead with my recipe anyway and it wasn't noticeable at all. So, keep in mind, a little too much minced garlic is okay. At least in this recipe. I don't recommend making this ooopss in in all recipes.

Add about 1 1/4 cups uncooked rice and cook another 5 minutes or so. Not sure why I don't have a picture of the rice? 

As a side note, I use brown rice for it's health benefits over white rice. However, just so you know, brown rice takes longer to cook, so in this recipe it will give it a crunchy texture. We are okay with that, but you may want to use white rice.

Add about 2 1/2 cups veggie broth. I use Swanson's organic - as you can see on the box it's all natural, 100% fat free, no msg and lower sodium. 

Bring the whole mixture to a boil. Turn it down to a simmer, cover and cook for about 20 minutes.

Place cut asparagus in a saucepan of water and bring to a boil. Turn down and simmer until tender but still firm.

At this point, your spaghetti, rice, onion, minced garlic and veggie broth mixture can be used as a homemade Rice A Roni dish (minus all the pastuerized, processed, excessively added to stuff that you buy on the shelf) just add whatever you want or have on hand. Or just add chicken or beef broth instead of veggie broth to make an alternative to store bought boxed dinners. Heck throw some left over chicken in there if you want to.

But right now we're making asparagus cashew rice pilaf. So, on with the show! When your rice mixture has been simmering for about 10 minutes and there are 10 minutes left, add about 1 cup of cashew halves. Recover and continue to simmer.

Cashews (or any kind of nut) is a great source of protein if you don't eat a lot of meat. Even though they are high in fat, it's the "good fat", so no worries.

When the rice mixture has been simmering about 15 minutes and has about 5 minutes left, drain and add your asparagus. Continue simmering the remaining 5 minutes.

That's it - you're done! Now just serve and eat. This is very good and very filling and Bossman approved.

There can be so many variations on this recipe. I want to try it with zucchini instead of asparagus to see how that would be. I would be interested in knowing what others would do with this recipe. Any ideas???

We followed our meal up with some fresh cherries and blueberries. Yummy!