The Recipe Doctor
From low-fat recipes to recipes designed for persons with diabetes, Elaine Magee, MPH, RD, shares recipes and advice to create healthy meals that are guaranteed to please. [Editor's note: Elaine no longer contributes to Silver Planet, but we have made her archived blog entries available as a service to our readers.]
Rice-A-Roni Savory Whole Grain Blends Roasted Garlic Italiano
A side dish for two
It’s a small box of a new rice mix now in the boxed grain section of your supermarket. Each box makes 2 servings and is a blend of whole grain brown rice with orzo (tiny pasta that resembles large grains of rice). Even though the brown rice is blended with a white flour pasta, each serving still contains 3 grams of fiber.
You can make it over the stove or in your microwave, though I recommend using the stove. If you buy it on sale, each serving will cost about 50 cents. The directions call for 1⅓ cups of water and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. You can definitely use 2 teaspoons of olive oil, however, so each serving will have around 250 calories and 6.5 grams of fat (mostly from monounsaturated fat) instead of 270 calories and 8.5 grams of fat.
This rice blend is easy to make and very tasty. I like that a single little box makes exactly 2 servings—but if you really consume half of the box, you will add 760 milligrams of sodium to your meal, which is half of the new daily suggestion of 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day!
I did notice that Rice-A-Roni had some low-sodium flavor options on the supermarket shelf, but they weren’t the ones using brown rice. Funny how that works. Can’t we have both? Don’t most people interested enough in their health to choose a whole grain product also want a product that is lower in sodium? Sounds logical to me!
Elaine Magee, MPH, RD
The Recipe Doctor Blog
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