Mediterranean Vegetable, Halloumi and Rice Bake | Recipes

Hi guys! I’ve been really struggling to think of good lifestyle posts in lockdown because everything I would usually write about seems so irrelevant. I was chatting to my dad on Father’s Day and he mentioned a meal he’d had recently that I thought I might enjoy. We looked for the original recipe but we couldn’t find it, so in the end I made up my own version of it. This is a super customisable recipe: all the vegetables are swappable, and so is the seasoning, so you can tailor it to your tastes, but this was what I did to make my version. It’s so simple and easy to do, so this is going to be a pretty short blog post, but no shame in that! Let me know if you try this, or if you’ve made a similar version of it before! I didn’t realise it was even possible to cook rice in the oven before I made this, but it was super easy and delicious.

Mediterranean Vegetable and Halloumi Rice Bake (Serves 2, 10 minutes prep time, 45 minutes cooking time).

Ingredients
175g brown rice (or 1 cup)
500ml water (or 2 cups)
2 red onions
2 bell peppers (any colour is fine)
1 courgette
225g block of halloumi
2 tsp harissa seasoning

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees C (or 180 if you have a fan oven).
2. Top and tail the courgette, and then slice it into discs.
3. Roughly chop the peppers and onions into large chunks. You want your chunks to be just over bite-sized ideally.
4. Chop the halloumi into roughly 2cm cubes.
5. Put all ingredients into a roasting bag (best to add rice and water first to make sure the rice is submerged, it’s fine if the veggies aren’t all covered by the water though) and tie the top. Alternatively, if you don’t have a roasting bag, an oven-proof dish with a lid will do the trick just fine.
6. Bake the bag in the oven for 45 minutes, or until the rice is soft. I will add here, our oven is known for being spectacularly slow at cooking anything, so you might need closer to 35 minutes.
7. Serve straight away, with any garnish you desire/have! Lemon or coriander would work well with the flavours I used. This dish would also be great with a little side salad if you want to add even more veggies into your meal.

If you enjoy this dish, try experimenting with different vegetables and seasoning! Mediterranean vegetables work really well with something like this because they have a high water content, so the water they release when they cook helps to keep the rice hydrated. If you use vegetables with a lower water content, you might want to compensate by adding a little extra water to make sure it doesn’t dry out.