No Christmas dinner in Perú is complete without at least one rice dish being present. A common rice side dish at the Christmas dinner table is Arab rice containing raisins a Coca Cola which sweetens the rice a bit and darkens it to a pale brown colour. As expected, we will not be pouring Coca Cola into this recipe. Instead, we will be using some soy sauce to tan the rice and brown sugar to sweeten it. This idea was not originally ours. We were inspired by Lorena of Cravings Journal‘s choice to use those to serve the aforementioned purposes while we doing our research into this dish.
The spicy component in this recipe is habanero chillies. However, if you can’t handle the heat of the chilli (which is heavily cut down and counteracted by the sweetness of the raisins), take out the seeds in them and just use them for colour and flavour purposes. Also, exclude the chilli flakes garnish or just use as much of it as you can handle.
As rice during Christmas is usually colourful, as aforementioned, we added the chillies, not just for their heat and flavour, but for their colour too. We also worked with a bag of dried fruits containing raisins, sultanas, currants and candied peels as opposed to just raisins and we added some kale which is ever so lightly cooked during that last few minutes of the rice cooking.
This is a delicious side dish which you will love to add to your Christmas dinner and it only takes about 25mins to cook making it relatively quick and easy to make.
Buen Provencho!
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