never try cooking brown rice in the microwave

Tonight, in my ill-fated attempt to concoct a vegetable pot pie from scratch, I managed to perform the most spectacular microwave disaster in my 30 years of life.

Let me just preface that by saying that I've had some truly awe-inspiring microwave disasters, a la exploding eggs. (Who knew you couldn't boil a whole egg in the nuker... sans water?)

My idea: Veggie pot pie topped with mashed parmesan cauliflower. I usually make chicken pot pie with a Bisquick crust, chicken veggies and chicken gravy, and mashed potatoes. Well. I was trying to watch the calories, so I thought to substitute mashed cauliflower for the potatoes, and I couldnt use chicken gravy because I gave up chicken for Lent. So I had the brilliant thought of making a veggie gravy from vegetable broth and flour.

I was already in a terrible mood. I'd not yet gotten my paycheck (yet again!), my newly cleaned kitchen was 1/2 piled with dirty dishes, and I was just rotten tired. On top of which, I realized that we didn't have any Bisquick in the house, which is pretty essential to making any kind of pot pie.

Oh, and no flour in the house either.

OK, so here I am with boiled veggies, veggie broth, mashed cauliflower and nothing else. I attempted to thicken the broth with corn starch (bad idea), added butter (gross!), then tried cooking orzo to bulk up the base (ew).

Then I thought - ooh ooh! Let's add some brown rice!

Well, brown rice takes a while to cook - and besides, the rice cooker still had rice. [OK - side note: Why did I not use the already cooked rice?! It just occured to me as I am writing this.] So I think, "Hey, let's cook some brown rice in the microwave!"

To make an already long disastrous story short, I blew a fuse, almost broke the microwave, seared the rice, and actually melted a hole in the glass pyrex top. Not only that, after I took it out to cool, the entire glass lid sank in and broke.




Yeah. Uh huh.

I ended up mixing the cauliflower and veggies, added some bay shrimp, sprinkled some breadcrumbs, and sticking the concoction in the oven. And you know what? My accidental recipe actually turned out pretty darn good. And its only 3 points per serving! Here's the recipe.