During National Rice Week, Tollyboy along with the rest of Westmill celebrated the flavours of rice, by sharing rice favourites from every part of the world.
From biryani to jollof, staff at Westmill Foods really got into the spirit of National Rice Week by cooking an array of rice dishes from across the globe using their portfolio of rice brands – including Tolly Boy, Habib and Green Dragon.
Exotic dishes such as macau, jollof, sushi, lamb biryani & pineapple fried rice were on the menu for the fortunate tasters at Westmill this week!
Senior Rice Brand Manager, Steven Perry said: “At Westmill we are in the fortunate position of having a workforce that is representative of the communities and consumers we serve. For National Rice Week we wanted to do something that reflected this in an engaging and meaningful way for all of our employees and what better way to do this than by making authentic rice dishes & by highlighting the versatile nature of rice!’’
Apart from the authentic South Asian, African and Oriental dishes that got everyone’s mouth watering, there was also a Great British Bake Off style competition held amongst the staff to make the best traditional British rice pudding. The competition was aptly called ‘The Great Rice Pudding Off.’ (Is there no bake? Or is a word missing in the name?)
The excellent and varied standard of dishes cooked so far during National Rice Week goes to show that no matter how diverse we are there is one thing that binds us all – Rice!
- Rice is the main food for half of the world’s population
- Rice is cultivated on every continent except Antarctica
- There are over 29,000 grains in one pound of long grain rice
- Rice is the symbol of life and fertility, which is why it is thrown at weddings
- The Chinese word for rice is the same as their word for food
Sweet potato, pumpkin seed and rice salad In honour of national rice week, check out the amazing recipe below!
Ingredients
- 130 gm Tolly Boy easy cook brown wholegrain rice
- 1 tin of black beans
- 20 gm fresh coriander
- 1 garlic clove
- 15 gm fresh root ginger
- 1 lime
- 30 gm raw pumpkin seeds
- 1 red chilli
- 2 soy sauce sachets (16ml)
- 300 gm sweet potato
Method
- Preheat the oven to 240 C.
- Cut the sweet potatoes into large bite-size pieces (skins on) and add them to a baking tray, drizzle with 1tbsp olive oil and season generously with salt.
- Place the tray into the oven for 25 mins or until they’re cooked.
- Rinse the rice, add it to a pot with plenty of cold water and bring to the boil over a high heat.
- Once boiling, reduce the heat to a minimum and cook for 15-20 mins or until tender with a slight bite.
- Once cooked, drain and return to the pot.
- Add the pumpkin seeds to a separate baking tray. Put them in the oven until they turn a slightly darkened brown, then set aside for later.
- Peel and finely chop (or grate) the garlic.
- Peel the ginger (scrape the skin off with a teaspoon) and finely chop (or grate).
- Cut the chilli in half lengthways, de-seed and chop finely.
- Combine the garlic, ginger, chilli and soy sauce in a small bowl with 2 tsp of brown sugar and 3 tbsp of olive oil. Half the lime and squeeze juice into the bowl and whisk it all together – this is the dressing.
- Drain and rinse the black beans.
- Once the rice is cooked tender, add in the black beans and cook for a further 4 mins.
- Drain the rice and beans and allow to steam dry for 1-2 mins or until it had cooled down slightly, before returning them both to the pot.
- Chop the coriander fine, including the stalks and chop the seeds to a coarse consistency.
- Add the sweet potato, dressing, chopped coriander and seed mixture to the
rice and bean pot and combine gently.
- Serve Hot.
Enjoy!
