The art of making the perfect amount of rice has always been beyond me, and honestly I think it’s more of a science than an art form. I mean yeah, I know it fluffs up and grows but somehow I still have yet to fully grasp this concept, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone on this one. It seems that every time I have ever gone to make rice I end up with enough to feed my entire apartment building. So instead of letting all that beautiful fluffy rice turn to dry leftovers for the next week, I’ve compiled some of the best ways to breathe new life into your surplus of leftover rice.
Photo by Sarah Silbiger
1. Fry it. Make fried rice, okay, I know you’re thinking ‘fried rice? OBVIOUSLY!’ but hey, you’ve gotta start somewhere, right? It’s as simple as this: get pan, add anything resembling a vegetable in your fridge, scramble in an egg, add rice and soy sauce, done.
Photo by Sarah Silbiger
2. Stir it into canned soup. For me a bowl of soup really doesn’t do it, so the solution: throw in some left over rice to thicken it and make it more of a meal.
3. Scramble it into some eggs for a hearty breakfast, or even just throw an egg on it because everyone knows that eggs make absolutely everything 100 times better.
4. Toss it into a salad. Salads can be pretty boring, and so can bland rice, so why not combine them and mix it with a funky dressing and some veggies? Voilà, a perfect next day lunch, and you can even stack the ingredients in a mason jar for an adorably portable lunch.
5. Sweeten it. If you’ve exhausted all of these options and somehow still have rice, it can only mean one thing—time for dessert rice, aka rice pudding. Super simple to make and you can top it with whatever your little heart desires.
Photo by Sarah Silbiger
MORE rice, rice, rice: