Modern “news” stories about food are rarely anything but stupid, often painfully so. Take this example from a week ago:
“Boy kibble” is one of the hottest food trends on social media today. Fitness influencers are cooking up a simple combination of ground beef and rice for a quick, low-calorie hit…Some men on social media admit to eating the meal up to seven times per week as a cheap way to build muscle…The simple and bland boy kibble diet is the newest entrant in the protein craze…
Cooked meat with rice has been a working-class staple in south Louisiana for centuries, where it’s called “dirty rice”. It’s not “kibble”, it’s not only for “boys”, and it’s only a “trend” because 21st-century Americans are largely herd animals who think meals should be exercises in either orthorexia or box-checking. My mother used to make it with ground beef, but I’ve seen people prepare it with everything from chicken livers to Italian sausage. There’s not really any “right” way to make it, though if your version is “bland” I wouldn’t try to feed it to a Louisianan if I were you. There is, however, a lesson here about how little difference in effort there is between palatable meals and something that could be called “kibble”, so I’m going to share my simple recipe. I’ve been making it this way for roughly 20 years, since the time my wasband told me he’d have liked it better if it had more gravy. It’s so simple, in fact, that it doesn’t even need to be broken into steps. First, cook a cup of rice in two cups of water. While that’s simmering, make two cups of beef bouillon; if you’re pathologically lazy, I think they have brown gravy mix in envelopes, in which case you can skip the flour in the next step. Then brown a pound of ground meat in a large skillet over medium heat; you can add chopped onion if you like, but I generally don’t. I add a tablespoon of Tony Chachere’s to the browning meat, but if you have a Yankee palate and can’t handle spices you could just use a half-teaspoon each of salt & pepper. When the meat is done, add a quarter cup of flour and stir until it is absorbed (less than a minute), then add the bouillon and stir until it starts to bubble (it won’t take long), then for one minute more. Turn off the heat, dump the rice into the skillet, and mix well. Total cooking time (discounting the rice), maybe ten minutes; easy enough for any incel to cook, and good enough that not even a sniffy “lifestyle” journalist will be tempted to compare it to dog food.
