Do you want something special during the holidays or any other special days? Instead of plain ordinary rice, surprise
your guests, family, etc. with black rice! It's cool.
You can get black rice now in many Asian stores (usually from Thailand).
When I was growing up in Aklan, my mother used to set aside a portion
of our riceland to plant malagkit (glutinuous rice) and tinta (black or purple rice) because she used to make a lot of delicacies
using these beautiful varieties of rice.
In the Tagalog region, black rice is made into flour and used as the main ingredient in Puto Bumbong, a kind of rice cake usually
available during the Christmas season.
So, if you can find black rice in your neck of the woods, serve it along your goodies during Christmas dinner. It is something different.
To cook it, you can cook it plain, like rice, or you can add spices like onions and carrots (sautee onions and sliced carrots in oil), then add
rice and water. Cook until the rice has absorbed the water.
Now, there's another black rice recipe that is very good too and does not need 'tinta' rice. If you can find squid that has still its
ink sac intact, you may use this to flavor and color the rice while boiling. You can then decorate the rice with squid rings. It's
a terrific all in one dinner or lunch, quite popular in Catalunya in Spain.
