Ingredients
Ingredients
In Italy, whenever you walk into a store that sells salumi or prepared foods, you will inevitably see some kind of rice salad. It's as ubiquitous as coleslaw is in delis here, and these rice salads can be just as unimpressive—often a half-hearted mix of canned corn, sliced olives, lackluster ham, vegetables, and rice. Still, we've always liked the idea of a rice salad and so decided to come up with a fresher, livelier version, using summer vegetables at their peak—sweet corn, ripe cherry tomatoes, spice radishes, cucumbers, and scallions, with herbs and caciocavallo cheese for complexity. But the biggest departure from the Italian standard is that instead of using the traditional white rice, we toss the vegetables with red rice from the Piedmont region. Red has a much deeper, earthier flavor than white rice and a firmer texture. If you can't find it, try using faro rather than substitution white or brown rice.
Portobello mushrooms have a meaty quality that makes them a healthy stand-in for the steak that you might expect to find in this kind of Chinese-style stir-fry. (But you can add some sliced steak, if you wish.) Broccolini is great for stir-frying because its thin stalks cook quickly. Don't confuse it with broccoli rabe, which it resembles -broccolini is much milder. This stir-fry also gets a non-Asian seasoning of thyme, which works beautifully with the other flavors.
Take any recipe for cooking rice. In the last 5 minutes of cooking, fold in some chopped up bok choy or Napa cabbage.