I think there’s this sudden craze on cooking whole tomato rice, but what’s not to like when it’s a healthy dish that’s really easy to cook too?

I’m not the greatest cook so simple, fuss-free recipes are the way to go for me. My favourite sites are Noob Cook and Ochikeron’s YouTube channel where the recipes look really easy to follow. To be honest, this is my first time following a recipe to cook a dish. (Yea, so much for recommending those two sites. Have really been lazy to do anything special. Haha.)

I followed Ochikeron’s recipe:

The recipe is for four servings/people, so I just halved it because there’s only me and hubby.

Instead of using plain water for the rice, I used dashi. Thought it would give the rice more flavour. Didn’t go through the fuss of making my own dashi. (Didn’t I mention that I’m lazy and want things fuss-free?) I just used the dashi sachets I got from NTUC. The one I got is about $11 for 20 sachets. It can be used for other things like the base for oden, dipping sauce, etc.

I also added marinated chicken fillet, fresh shitake, and frozen mixed vegetables. I usually marinate chicken with a little light soya sauce and sesame oil.

This was how it looked like after it was done cooking. Not too bad. Smelled pretty good too…

Mixed the tomato with the rice…

At this point, I realised tomatoes are really juicy. After mixing, the rice was a little too wet. I know that Ochikeron advised to remove some water, but I thought dashi would be a little different. Besides, I’m using brown rice which needs more water than white rice. White rice needs one cup of water to one cup of rice. Brown rice needs about one and a half to one and three quarter cups of water to one cup of rice. Guess I should have just taken her advice.

I felt the rice could do with a little less salt. Perhaps the dashi also added to saltiness. So slightly less salt if using dashi. Shall try again with plain water to taste the difference.

Do try cooking this some time. It’s really simple to make.