Coconut Milk Rice With Spinach For Your DASH Diet Menu

Whether you are on the 1200, 1500, or 1600 calorie DASH diet, every calorie counts. This recipe for coconut milk rice with spinach is ridiculously easy, quick to make (if the rice is prepared in advance) and very tasty. It contains lots of fiber, Potassium, Magnesium and other vitamins and minerals needed to lower your blood pressure.

I served it with tilapia under pineapple salsa; the whole meal was delicious and very well put together.

What is especially good is that every ingredient represents a different DASH food group. Coconut milk technically contains fat, but coconut counts as a fruit group. Rice counts as grains, and spinach counts as a veggie group.

If you can afford it, try to buy coconut milk that is canned plain, without use of chemicals. In the ingredient list, you will likely see “Coconut milk EXTRACT, water”, and the price could be about 20-30% higher. Here is an example:

Turn these cans around:

Bear in mind, most brands contain even more unreadable stuff; I picked these three because there was either none or only one “extra ingredient”. Natural, more expensive coconut milk regularly goes on sale in Chinese and Thai supermarkets. When it does, you can buy many cans – hey, they can store forever!

Back to the recipe:

Coconut Milk Rice With Spinach

Ingredients

• 2 cups of cooked brown rice (use white rice if you want, but brown rice is better for you)
• 1/2 can of coconut milk (add more if needed; use coconut cream for better taste but beware of more fat!)
• 10 cups of chopped spinach. Seriously. It’s about one bunch of spinach or 1/2 bag of spinach from the store. Don’t be afraid – spinach shrinks a lot!
• 1/2 cup pineapple chunks (optional) or 1/2 cup pineapple juice
• lime juice (optional)

1. Wash, drain, and chop spinach.
2. Open a can of coconut milk, mix it well, and pour into the pan. Add pineapple juice.
3. Use cooked rice. If it is from the freezer, no need to thaw it before cooking. Mix it into the coconut milk, and cover with a lid. Cook for a few more minutes after boiling.
4. Add spinach to boiling rice, mix well and cover. In two minutes, mix again. Cook for 2 more minutes. Done!
5. Squeeze several drops of lime on top and taste your rice. I think it tastes much better with the lime. If you like it, squeeze more lime.

Note: I cooked the rice in milk for some time so that the rice absorbed the milk. Otherwise, 3/4 total cup of liquid could be too much.
Another tasty addition could be chopped cilantro.

So, what do we have here… 4 servings of grains, 1-1.5 servings of fruit, and about 6-7 servings of veggies.

Enjoy, and happy DASH dieting!

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