A Night of Food with Uncle Ben’s

Dinner is a struggle around our house. I don’t have particularly picky eaters but meal planning exhausts me. We’re big on variety in our house so if I serve a meal more than about twice a month, it’s doomed to never be eaten again. We discover a lot of great new recipes because of this but lately I find that I’m lacking in the creativity department so I’m always up for new ideas. I try and serve meals that are cooked from scratch because I have a 2 year old who is allergic to some unknown preservative so we just tend to avoid them all. My 4 year old suffers from asthma and chronic respiratory infections so it’s really important that we eat foods that will help keep all of us healthy. I’ve been lucky that my kids love fruits, veggies, and whole grains but the downside of that is most whole grains take forever to cook – and as a busy mom, time is something that is in short supply.

I was thrilled to be invited to an Uncle Ben’s cooking event at the LA Food Works and hoped it would rekindle my enthusiasm for dinnertime. Uncle Ben’s had a great surprise in store for us with their new whole grain white rice which has twice the fiber of brown rice but cooks in about the same amount of time that it takes to cook white rice. They teamed up with Missy Chase Lapine, author of The Sneaky Chef to create some great new recipes that use the new whole grain white rice to create a nutritious and kid-friendly meal.

My kids devoured the pizza rice balls we made, which completely shocked me because they usually won’t touch anything that is mixed together – they are of the “my foods should never, ever touch each other” camp. The rice balls used Uncle Ben’s new Sweet Tomato rice and had a few sneaky ingredients in them like sweet potatoes. We put together simple bean and cheese burritos – always a hit at my house – with whole grain white taco rice and some hidden zucchini and cauliflower. The recipe that I was most surprised by though was the BBQ chicken pizza with a crust made out of rice. The texture added an interesting variation to the pizza – which is a staple food in our house – and was surprisingly easy to put together. A sauce of chickpeas mixed with BBQ sauce gave the meal an extra boost of protein and you never would have guessed that it was low-fat.

It was a blast having a night out and enjoying some great food. I had so much fun meeting Kari from A Giveaway Addicted Mommy and Janis from The Mommy Blog Expert. As a wahm, I don’t get out much. Really. My kids are shocked when I go somewhere without them because it almost never happens. I really enjoy the chance to get out and meet other mommy bloggers and meet people in person that I already feel like I’ve met online.

We’ve been testing several of the new flavors of Uncle Ben’s whole grain white rice at home. My kids love the taco flavor – no surprise considering tacos are about the only thing they would happily eat every night of the week without complaint. The texture is very similar to white rice. It isn’t quite as fluffy as white rice but it isn’t nearly as dense as brown rice is. Personally I really don’t mind brown rice though and my kids will happily eat it too but the cooking time kills me when I’m trying to get dinner on the table quickly. That’s where Uncle Ben’s whole grain white rice really shines because it has the nutritional value of brown rice but cooks in under 10 minutes. It’s been a great sidenote to several of our dinner’s this week.

“I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour campaign by Mom Central on behalf of Uncle Bens and received the product necessary to facilitate my candid review. In addition, I received a gift card to thank me for taking the time to participate.”