Super Easy Meal Ideas Anyone?

Even before going gluten free, I had found that steaming up some meat and veggies then serving them over rice with some sort of sauce was pretty easy, not all that time consuming, good for leftovers ... and also avoided the problems toxins developing in food due to high-heat cooking.

Ingredients:

• Your choice of meat. My favs include boneless chicken or sausage (and fortunately, my grocery stores carry gluten-free varieties)
• Your choice of vegetables. I normally go with sweet bell peppers, onions, garlic, mushrooms, and black olives but vary them to go with the meat. Include your favorites or experiment with new ones.
• Your choice of rice.

Step one: Put the meat in a pan to brown in either butter or olive oil. Only takes a couple minutes on both sides and does not require high heat. You just want to bring out a little bit of flavor.

Step two: Get your rice started.

Step three: Start cutting up your veggies. I start with those that take the longest to cook.

Step four: Your meat should be done browning as your first vegetable is cut. Add some water to your pot/pan and just keep adding your vegetables as you finish cutting them, keeping a lid on it so that it steams rather than fries. And you don't want too much water, just enough to keep the bottom of the pan wet, adding more if it cooks off. You're not boiling but steaming, so you don't want everything to be covered, rather just 1/4" in the bottom. (Any time there is water in your pan, the temperature won't rise above boiling point so you can avoid those nasty carcinogens that form when foods are fried).

You should be done adding your veggies in the first 10 minutes and have five or ten minutes to kick back while everything finishes cooking, depending on your rice's cooking time. And the meat should cook up pretty quickly because it is being steamed, heat surrounding it on all sides.

Step five: Add or make some sort of sauce.

If I used sweet italian sausage, I'll normally just add some spaghetti sauce and spices to my pot of meat and veggies, warm it up for another two minutes and then serve everything over rice.

If I do chicken, I'll pull all of the meat and veggies out of the pan, add some more butter/oil and water to the remaining liquid (so that I end up with enough sauce to pour over my rice/chicken and veggies) and use a combination of starches and flours (now gluten-free) to make a white, gravy-like sauce. You can add a little at a time until it thickens up but it should only take about five minutes. If you want it to be more like a white sauce and can do dairy, then I'd use butter and cream instead of olive oil and water.

This one will need spices so I normally add plenty of my favorite green spices (dried) such as basil, thyme, tarragon, and sage. I normally smell them as I go, so it varies according to my mood that day. Oh, and you'll probably want to salt it some too. Mushrooms go particularly well with the chicken though it does turn out rather colorless.

Either way, it normally doesn't take more than 20 minutes for the sausage version, 25 for chicken, and is great for feeding multiple people or for leftovers. Plus you get a meal that is very filling and doesn't leave you craving more.

But my favorite part of this is that most of the ingredients don't go bad quickly so it can be done without having been to the grocery store recently. Onions and garlic last for months, black olives come from a can, meat can be frozen, spices are dried, sauces are either from a jar or made from scratch, and even mushrooms can be the dried versions.

There is also plenty of room for variation and experimentation to switch out types of meats or vegetables. It's kind of like a halfway point between a crock pot and a stir-fry meal.

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