Feed Me That! : Wild Rice Uses

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Title: Wild Rice Uses
Categories: Amerind Rice Info
Yield: 1 Servings

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Pancakes: Form cooked wild rice into thick pancakes or thin patties. Fry in butter. Serve with maple syrup. If you don't have any, heating brown sugar, butter and a little water (1 part water to 4 parts brown sugar) makes a better syrup than the kind you buy. Ricecakes are also good with berry syrups or honey, or at a main meal with butter or gravy..

Breakfast cereal: Serve cold or warm cooked rice with sugar or honey and cream. Stir ins: sunflower seeds, chopped apple, peach, pear; choppeed dried fruits.

Bird Stuffing: Fry green onions, celery, add chopped nuts, chopped unpeeled apples, chopped dried fruit or berries, sunflower seeds. Rice stuffing won't absorb fat the way bread stuffing does, but wild birds usually aren't very fat anyway, and neither are small chickens and most turkeys. Taste stuffing, add whatever seasonings you like with it. Use no conventional poultry seasonings, and remember too it doesn't need so much salt as regular rice, maybe none. Remember that one cup of raw rice cooks up to 4, and make an amount somewhat larger than needed to stuff your birds, because people like it a lot, so put some in a (covered) casserole too. Before you stuff wild birds wash inside and out very well with water that has baking soda and salt in it, then rinse. Then rub the cavity with butter.

Stuffing for a big fish: Use quite a bit of coarsely chopped celery, green onions, tarragon, parsley, chervil and fry it lightly before mixing into the rice. Almonds is the best kind of nuts to put in a stuffing for fish. Put some little lumps of butter all through it. Rub the inside of the fish with lemon juice mixed with a little butter, sprinkle with dried tarragon. Stuff the cavity with rice and skewer or sew it shut. Put the fish whole in a buttered covered baking dish, pour in a mixture of lemon juice. bouquet garni, chopped shallot, olive oil, fish stock, and a mixture of lemon juice and water if you don't keep wine around your house, otherwise use white wine. The mixture should have the fishes resting in at least 1/2 inch deep liquid but not covered by it.

For several 4-lb pike (gaawag), bake in a 400 oven for 15 minutes, remove the cover and bake 15 minutes longer. Make add a cup of cream sauce from the juices, pressing them through a sieve. If it's a really big pike or muskie, cut a board with slanted ends to fit diagonally into your oven, cover it with tinfoil while it bakes, guesstimate the time based on lies about its weight, don't cook any fish too done,

With deer-meat: ground deer meat partly-fried can be mixed into cooked rice with chopped fried onions and simmered as a kind of stove-top casserole. You can also make the ground deer meat into little meat balls and serve with a gravy over the rice. Of course you can do this with hamburger too, but fry off some of its fat, first.

preparing wild rice soups or casseroles to sell at powwows, do not skimp on the rice and serve some kind of tasteless, watery mush. Put some onions and meat into it, too! Cook the rice in meat broth. Put onions in it, wild onions was traditional, but onions are usually left out for cheap, selling it at powwow booths. I've had some really awful wild rice glop from vendor booths at powwows. They start running out, they just put more water in the pot. Indian tacos is just hamburger in sauce on fry bread, it's OK to pad or stretch that out, but wild rice is a sacred gift. Do it right or don't do it. When you run low, serve the last of it and close up, don't put a lot of water in to stretch it so you can sell more.

If you are a city person, you can "tame" rice farmed in paddies. Chances are this will look very dark, which most likely means the rice laid around quite a while, drying, before it was parched (in a commercial oven) and husked (by a machine). It will always be completely broken up. Such rice may take a long time to cook. If you belong to an alternative foods co-op, you may be able to get them to contact an actual tribal or native supplier of wild rice. Most tribes who live in rice areas do have a tribal rice enterprise, and for many large families who go ricing every year, it's a cash crop, as well as a personal food supply and a pleasant excursion. Many tribes now process commercial rice in mechanical plants, though. It isn't paddy rice, but there's not that much difference. And sometimes it is paddy rice, too. Hybrids seeded in artificial or real lakes, by tribal contractors. This is economically helpful, but I still don't like it.

If you have a chance to try different varieties of truly wild rice from many different lakes, you will see that it can have quite different flavors. People still trade their local wild rice for another tribe's from elsewhere. Unfortunately, elders from Northern Minnesota ricing areas report that nearby off-reservation commercial paddies are experimenting with different laboratory-breeds of zinzania aquatica which are cross-breeding with the natural tribal wild rice, and the natural types are being replaced by undesired new hybrids on many lakes. Nobody likes this, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to stop it. Tame, paddy rice is big business for large food corporations, today, so the Jolly Green Giant is taking over from the Manidos who gave the rice to the people.

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