Currently cooking out of The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman

While not a total flop, this dish didn’t turn out anything like it was supposed to. It was kind of boring, greasy and mushy. The dish was so monotonously grayish green, I didn’t even bother to get a picture of it.

Stuck-pot style refers to a method of cooking rice so that the rice on the bottom forms a brown, crunchy crust. When you invert the rice onto a plate, the crust becomes the top of the dish. I was excited to give this dish a try, and I thought the textural differences in the rice would be interesting.

The dish starts off by parboiling brown rice and browning chicken drumsticks in olive oil (I used boneless, skinless chicken thighs). Thinly sliced cabbage and minced garlic is added to the oil in the pot and sauteed until the cabbage is softened. The next step involves layering the rice, meat and vegetables in the pot, starting and ending with the rice. The dish cooks for 45 minutes or until the rice is tender.

So what went wrong? I think my biggest mistake was using too large of a pot, which meant I had to use more oil to make sure the rice didn’t burn which meant I ended up with greasy rice. I also should have added more liquid to the pot in the beginning to get the rice more tender. I’m not sure what went wrong with the cabbage; it came out of the pot very mushy. If I try this dish again, I’ll try cooking the cabbage less in the beginning.