Late-night rice

Three and a half pints of London Pride; arrived home at 9.30 p.m. Not my favourite feeling. I did not want to eat anything with bread, because I had eaten sandwiches for lunch. So I put together a rice dish, in 15 minutes: chopped onion, green pepper and garlic, thrown into a pan with some groundnut oil and softened; meanwhile, rice thrown into boiling water and cooked for 10 minutes; rice tipped into vegetables and stirred up with a teaspoon of harissa. If your overriding aim is to get some food inside yourself, that is a pretty decent supper. One of its pluses as a late-night dish is that it does not sit heavily on the stomach.

To soften a pan of onion and pepper in little more than 10 minutes, you need a medium heat. As I wrote in my previous post, that compels you to keep the vegetables moving, or they and the oil will burn. The pan gets hotter and hotter; once the cooking is underway, you can turn down the flame.