Jeera Rice

When you just have 1 hour in hand and have to rush to office, its pretty obvious that you'll end up with one pot meals which save you from tedious curries, rice and dals. On my quench to find out one pot meals and after browsing many blogs for the same, I found out many easy to prepare 15 minute recipes like Tomato kidney beans rice, Spinach and Mint rice, Soya Bean rice, Manchurian rice, Schzewan rice, ghee rice etc.. This list goes as crazy as it can be and as lenghtiest it could. We have many bloggers there... who gave lot of work to their brains and came up with some deluctable one pot meal ideas.. One such recipe which attracted me was Manchurian Rice on Sailu's website. Left over Manchuria's served as starter can be used up with rice the next day.. can give one a gastronomical ride... I am gonna try that soon... provided I get up early that day :P
Now I have Morphy Richards Chopper with me which can ease my cooking and let me prepare gravy based curries... Yippie... I am gifting that one for myself.....Yay..
Coming back to the header reflecting on my blogpost. I've had enuf disasters with Jeera Rice. Yes.. it was terrible... The one I am presenting to you was perfected after 4 futile attempts...Lot many blogs have Jeera Rice recipes and they have 2 different versions to prepare the same. One involves dumping everything into the rice cooker and allowing it to cook and the second one involves doing everything individually. I tried the first one and this was mentioned on Sanjeev Kapoor's website and many other blogs... unfortunately.. it became too mushy and wasn't even palatable when I followed the procedure. Second & third were kind of ok..ok.
But this one was the best and perfect.. it just tastes like the one you have in restaurants that serve North Indian food. Here we go with it.

JEERA RICE
You need:
Cooked rice: 1 cup (rice grains should be separate)
Jeera - 2 tsps (you can increase or decrease the amount of jeera)
Ghee and Oil mix- 2 tbsps
Roasted Cashews- handful (fry a handful in ghee or dry roast in a pan)
Onions- 1/2 sliced.
Coriander- 1 tbsp chopped finely.
Curry leaves- 1 stem
Bayleaf- 1
Cloves- 5-6
Cardamom- 2-3
Cinnamon stick- 2 two inch sticks
Salt as per taste
Green Chillies- 3-4 slit length wise

Procedure:
Heat oil-ghee mixture in a pan and fry all the spices for a min or two. Be careful that you do not burn them. We just need their flavour but not their bodies (:-P).
Take another pan and deep fry onions until golden brown. We need them for garnishing and don't have any role to play till the end. In the same pan where you are frying the spices, add curry leaves along with green chillies and fry for 1 min. Now add jeera to it and saute this entire mixture for 1 and 1/2 min. Your flame should be low or sim (Indian terminology).  Add salt to this jeera mixture and finally add rice. Combine all the ingredients well by adding cashews and coriander.

 Fry this rice mixture for 4-5 mins and your rice will be slightly brown and you will nice flavor emanating.  Transfer the contents onto a serving bowl and garnish with cashews, chopped coriander and fried onions.
This simple and delicate beauty will be blended with any curry to perfection. Try our Paneer Tikka Masala, Chilly Paneer, Rajma Masala  or any other curries of your choice. You can find more curries on Aathidhyam @ Curries

My Notes:
1)Google and you will find many recipes where you can fry this Jeera mixture in advance and cook it along with rice (1 cup rice with 1 and 3/4th cup or 1 and half cup of water). Once rice is cooked, you can fork it to separate the grains. This method will ensure that rice picks up the spice flavors and enhances the taste. For me this method didn't work.
2) While cooking rice, adding 2 tsps of oil will ensure that rice doesn't stick.
3) You can add chopped onions after frying spices. Its optional and doesn't enhance the taste.
 4) You can add a pinch of sugar which elevates the taste.