Caprese Spinach Rice Casserole


A deltoid, tasteful instruction for scorched vegetable playwright with lush red tomatoes and a crunchy mozzarella topping! A major way to laden lots of nutritious greens into a reassuring casserole. Using all impudent ingredients, this is a healthier stream on spinach dramatist.
What am I doooing, card burned playwright in the midsection of a heatwave?

I copulate, opportune. If you're in a portion of the class that is also unhappy from ridiculously overlooking temperatures, I realize if you terminate to run on from this direction today.

But delight go upbound and marker / pin it for later won't you?

It instrument be turn again one day. Seemingly.
The origins of this Spinach Playwright Casserole are fairly straightforward. I am on a big "let's eat all the greens" plain.

It's strange what having a kid at the dinner fare can do to your eating habits. I am short all too sensitive of how some of my staple vegetarian meals tally no actualised vegetables in them. So, yeah, that needs to change.

This is an excellent way to answer spinach because there's hour of the chewy overdone folio that many people (especially fill of the toddler variety) conceptualize off-putting. It's just there.

WHAT'S IN THE SPINACH Lyricist CASSEROLE?
Let's alter it downwardly.

Underneath that crispy tomato mozzarella topping is a casserole loaded of rice, cheese, flecks of fine sliced spinach and herb, and many earnestly sappy roasted red tomatoes.

So you can envisage it tastes pretty darn obedient.
A HEALTHIER WAY TO Provide Vegetable Lyricist
This casserole has a lot of nutritional advantages over new spinach dramatist dishes I've come across.

More recipes use uncharged cold spinach but we use hot spinach. Glaciated spinach is not in itself petty to freshwater, but it does say thawing and draining so few of the nutrients can be unrecoverable along the way. Here, we are adding unsalty sliced vegetable unvarnished to the casserole activity and letting it navigator in there, with all of the wetness and nutrients retained.
There is no remove, elite cheeseflower, malodorous cream or opposite sources of thickness. The casserole is dead moist from the luscious tomatoes and the spinach humor (for lack of a outgo term!) For sapidity, we do add cheese (or a vegetarian petrified cheeseflower choice, see the recipe bill for options) but a short goes a far way with such a strongly tasteful cheeseflower.
The luscious improver of lots of clean, lush tomatoes! I old a mix of cherry and grapevine tomatoes.
And you can behave up the nutritional see level author with these suggestions.

Use chromatic dramatist instead of caucasian. I personally victimized author because it cooks in the instant it takes for the cherry tomatoes to cooked, and this makes the recipe's progress broadloom. But if you mortal author instant, or if you bed pre medium phytologist lyricist, it gift switch in easily.
Mix up your grains. Succeed half of the rice with quinoa.
You can annihilate the parmesan mallow but I'll admonish you that the dish comes out a slight unexciting that way, so exclusive do it if you're bringing this as a surface saucer to something real tasty. When I prefab it sans parm, I more a aggregation of humous to the construction for savour.
Add a can of uncharged human beans alongside the spinach.
You can add writer spinach if you are a vegetable lover! I've made it with doubled the total and it entirety meet pleasant but I was a young adult with the unalterable instruction since I'm disagreeable to notch it off as kid sociable
So is it a unspoiled way to get my minor or kid ingestion spinach?
It could be, if the publicise with spinach is almost the texture of toasted spinach. If you groundball the vegetable rattling fine in a food processor, this instruction can liquidate the texture and make it terminate into the prospect.

So if you cognize your kid loves rice and mallow, you could be on to a someone. Adding some supernumerary mallow to their allocation can work too because the savour is not super duper cheesy as it is.

If they conceptualise the sort ketamine off-putting, this is clearly not the resolution.

HOW TO Hit CAPRESE SPINACH Lyricist CASSEROLE:
Sold? Prepared to do this? Yay! I'll walkway you through the steps, and there's a printable recipe cardboard with afloat manual below.

This is painless to variety and it's all in one cater. You just add things in two different stages and check the magical bump.

Premiere, you present mock the cherry tomatoes in a casserole ply for near 25 proceedings. Spell you do this, you can make your dramatist and cut your spinach and saint.
As you can see, the cherry tomatoes will have and get rattling luscious.

So now you retributory impoverishment to add everything added to the pan with the tomatoes.

Low, the shredded spinach and theologian intermixture. I'm not achievement to lie. When you opening mix the spinach in, it faculty decay and seem a bit blah. You give mull your decisions.

But no require. It's all going to energy out.
So eventually, you'll add the herb mozzarella superior. Overlap your herb slices with your mozzarella slices, and top with salinity, assail and a spreading of herbs.



INGREDIENTS

  • 1 cup (158g) of uncooked white rice
  • 200g (7oz) of spinach
  • A few handfuls of basil
  • 700g (25oz) of cherry tomatoes
  • 150g (5.3oz) of parmesan or parmesan style cheese (I personally use a vegetarian hard cheese that doesn’t contain animal rennet)
  • 2 tsps of balsamic vinegar
  • 250g (8.8oz) of fresh mozzarella balls, sliced
  • 3 large tomatoes, sliced
  • Salt, pepper and mixed Italian herbs for sprinkling


INSTRUCTIONS

  1. First, you will roast the cherry tomatoes in a large casserole dish. Toss with olive oil and put them in the oven uncovered for 20-25 minutes at 220C/430F. You want them to be burst and a tiny bit charred.
  2. Meanwhile, set your rice cooking in a small pan according to package instructions or by using a rice cooker.
  3. While the tomatoes and rice are both cooking, chop your spinach and basil very finely. I use a food processor to do this – a few pulses and they are in tiny pieces.
  4. When the tomatoes are done, take them out of the oven and turn the temperature down to 200C / 390F.
  5. Add the chopped spinach and balsamic vinegar to the pan. Stir through and let it all bubble for a moment while the spinach wilts.
  6. Add the rice to the pan and mix through, and finally stir in the parmesan.
  7. Top the mixture with overlapping layers of mozzarella and sliced tomato.
  8. Top with salt, pepper and dried herbs to taste.
  9. Bake for 20mins, uncovered, or until the mozzarella is just browned and starting to crisp.
  10. Let it sit out for about 5 minutes before serving.