This Mexican Rice is exactly like the heaping side dish you get at your favourite Mexican restaurant. It’s fluffy, full of flavour and veggies, and almost impossible to stop eating. Seriously. I had to have a giant bowl of it sitting on the table for me to eat while taking these pictures because I couldn’t help myself.
I’ll admit, I’m a rice lover. I think it’s because rice is such a sponge for flavour. You can pretty much make a rice to match your meal just by using the same flavour-adding ingredients in both. In this case, I mashed together my favourite Mexican Rice recipe with the Cheesy Beef Quesadillas I was making for dinner. Spoiler alert – they were both incredible.
What Makes It Mexican Rice?
So, what makes Mexican Rice, well, Mexican Rice? It’s all about that gorgeous orange colour, and how it gets it. Mexican Rice is flavoured with a combination of tomatoes, onions, chicken broth, and cumin. If you’ve had Spanish rice it’s really similar. The difference is that instead of flavouring with cumin, Spanish rice uses saffron, and the colour is more yellow than orange.
The thing that also stands out to me at restaurants are the “extras” in the rice. The veggies can be mixed up a bit depending on what you have at home, and what you like. I always have a potato in it, and consider that a staple.
I also like to throw a handful of frozen corn into my Mexican Rice. You could use a can of drained Mexi-corn if you had it instead, or regular canned corn. You could also dice up a carrot, or some bell peppers. Add anything you like. just dice it all up nice and small. No pieces of any veg should be bigger than a corn kernel, so that it’s easy to scoop up and eat.
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