Barbecue sauce meets rice and the results are delicious
Chicken and rice is probably one of my favorite meals, so add some barbecue sauce and vegetables and you’ve got me hooked.
To make this recipe, you just need the following ingredients:
- 1 tbsp. oil
- 1diced red pepper
- 1 diced yellow pepper
- 2 cloves of minced garlic
- 1 ½ cups instant white rice
- 1 ¼ cups water
- ¼ cup barbecue sauce
- 4 cooked chicken breasts
- 1 diced tomato
- 1 cup shredded cheese
- 2 green onions
So right off the bat I did things a little differently. I bought raw chicken, cut it into bite sized chunks and cooked those in a pan. I would definitely recommend using precooked chicken (possibly some leftovers or rotisserie chicken) or at least adding a little seasoning to your chicken. I cooked mine plain and it was fine, but I would have loved a little extra kick.
Next, add the oil to a large skillet and dice your two peppers while this heats up to a medium-high heat. Once you have a nice warm pan, you’ll need to add your peppers to cook for about 7 minutes. Make sure you stir this fairly consistently because you don’t want the peppers to burn. Add in your minced garlic and stir for another minute.
At this point, you need to add your barbecue sauce, water and rice. I was a little nervous about this part because I wasn’t sure how well the barbecue sauce and water would mix together, but it went surprisingly well. Once this starts boiling, you’ll want to turn the heat down to a medium-low heat.
Now here’s where I deviated from the recipe again. I let my rice cook for ten minutes before I added the chicken, tomato and cheese. The recipe says to do this immediately after adding the water, but I wanted to make sure that my rice was cooked thoroughly and since my chicken was already warm, I had that luxury. However, I don’t think it would really matter what order you do this.
Once all of that is mixed, add your green onion. I actually used a single white onion and let them cook a little bit with the chicken to soften them up.
Now you’re done!
What I liked most about this recipe was that it was fairly quick to make and there was a lot of room to improvise. I’m not a fantastic chef, but even I was able to make little adjustments to make this meal work for my life and my tastes. I would highly recommend this one!
