A vermicelli and rice dish stirs up fond memories
It is infinitely surprising to me the connections you can make through food.
I grew up as a committed omnivore in rural Central Florida in the 1980s, and I wouldn’t have necessarily expected to be hit with a visceral taste memory as I was flipping through “Vegan Africa” by Marie Kacouchia. But I made a hard stop when I saw her recipe for Vermicelli Rice With Spinach and Cashews. Initially, it was because carbbased dishes always earn my undivided attention. This one kept it.
Kacouchia talks about how the dish was a favorite of hers growing up in Ivory Coast in West Africa and says she added spinach to the ricevermicelli mix when she started making it for herself.
I’m going to warn you, the connection may seem tenuous, but here is where her story immediately took me:
When I was in high school, my mom started working outside the home. As the oldest of three kids, I was tasked with cooking dinner for my siblings a few nights a week. At least once a week, that meant I made what became my specialty: chicken with barbecue-flavored Shake ‘n Bake with sides of canned spinach (doused in vinegar) and a box of Rice-A-Roni.
If you’re not familiar with Rice-A-Roni – well, I’m pretty surprised because I considered it one of the major food groups until I was about 20, but here’s a primer: It’s rice with broken vermicelli in it. You saute them for a couple minutes until the pasta browns, then add a seasoning packet and water to cook it. Pretty simple.
The nights I made that meal, I always thought the chicken was fine, but I loved the rice, and I used to mix the spinach into it on my plate. I knew virtually nothing about cooking or the cuisines of various cultures, but I always liked how the texture of the pasta was a little different than that of the rice, and then how the spinach added a different dimension to the pairing.
I can’t remember the last time I bought a can of spinach, much less a box of RiceA-Roni, but reading this recipe
put the taste of that combination in my brain in a way that left only one option: I had to make it.
You can guess where this is heading. It was terrific. Kacouchia, who writes that the dish she enjoyed as a child originated in Lebanon before being adopted through West Africa, doesn’t call for browning the vermicelli, so I tamped down my impulse to do that. Curry powder and ginger add personality to the broth, and wilting the fresh spinach into the rice codifies the personal
preference I developed decades ago.
The cashews fill the protein role from the chicken in a way that makes a lot of sense for the way I like to cook lately. I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve even considered embellishing the roasted nuts with a dry barbecue seasoning, and maybe hitting the final dish with a dash of vinegar, slightly bending Kacouchia’s memory just enough to meet my own.
Maybe I’ll do that sometime when my brother and sister come over for dinner.