Puerto Rican Rice with Pigeon Peas

By TPMay

Ingredients

• Uncooked white rice (about 1 handful per person)
• Water
• Vegetable cooking oil
• Sazón, 1 packet
• 2 tablespoons tomato sauce
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon sofrito or recaito
• Olives (use the Spanish salad olives with pimientos), about 5-6 olives
• 1 can of Gandules (Pigeon Peas)*, drained and rinsed
• Salt, to taste
• Adobo, to taste

Preparation

Step 1

Put rice into your rice cooker’s pot and clean the rice. If you’re not familiar with how to clean rice, it just means that you run it under water a couple of times and pick out the dark grains, pebbles, etc. To do this:
Fill pot with water and press rice with your hands.
Pick out anything that’s not a rice grain.
Pour out water, being careful not to lose any of the rice.
Repeat a few times until water pours out clear.
Add water to the pot until the water sits just above the rice. (I’ve heard that normally it is a 2-1 ratio: for every cup of rice, you add 2 cups of water. I’ve never cooked it this way, as I find it turns out to be too much water, making the rice too mushy.)
Add a serving-spoon’s worth of cooking oil. Not a tablespoon, but the bigger spoon one uses to stir a pot. (Should turn out to be close to 3 Tbsp of oil.)
Add remaining ingredients.
Stir.
Taste the water. If you feel it needs more seasoning, you can add a little of either salt or Adobo to your liking.
Cover and set the rice cooker to cook.
There will be no need to stir the rice while it cooks, though you certainly can do so once about mid-way through. Your arroz should be done in about 30 minutes or so. You will know it’s done when you taste the rice and it’s neither mushy nor tough.