Crab-Cheese Pilaf

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Happy weekend everyone!  This is a recipe for Crab-Cheese Pilaf.  It is from the Weight-Watching chapter from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook of 1963.  This was pretty easy to make, quite tasty, and could easily serve four hungry adults.

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(recipe and instructions are written as found in cookbook)

(240 calories per serving)

2 tablesp. salad oil
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup sliced celery
1/4 cup diced green pepper
1/4 lb fresh mushrooms, sliced, or 1 3-or 4-oz. can mushrooms (optional)
1/2 cup thinly sliced carrots
1 teasp. salt
1 bay leaf, crumbled
1 tablesp. granulated sugar
2 l-lb. cans tomatoes
3/4 cup packaged pre-cooked rice
2 6- to 7-oz. cans King-crab meat, drained
1/2 cup grated natural Cheddar cheese

Start heating oven to 350 degrees F.  In salad oil, in a large ovenproof skillet, saute onion, celery, green pepper, mushrooms, and carrots until onion is golden brown; add salt, bay leaf, sugar, and tomatoes; simmer 5 min.  Stir rice and crab meat into tomato mixture; sprinkle cheese on top; bake 20 to 25 min.  Serve in soup bowls, if desired.  Makes 5 servings.

Notes:

• Please use lump crab meat if you can afford it.  I couldn't afford it this week and used the small, flaked crab meat.  While you can taste the crab with the small, flaked crab meat all it really does is flavor the dish of crab.  You do not get to actually bite into the crab meat which would have tasted much better.
• Since this sauce is essentially a pasta sauce you could replace the crab with any meat/protein you would use it a pasta dish.  When it comes to using any other sort of seafood I would use whatever you would like to eat with a tomato-based sauce.
• In 1963 they used the term "packaged pre-cooked rice", which we now know as instant rice/minute rice.
• The rice came out perfectly for me.  I cooked it for 20 minutes in the oven and the rice was not over- nor under-done.
• I do not own an ovenproof skillet, so I transferred the pilaf to a 13x9 oven-safe dish and that was the perfect size to hold all of the pilaf.
• Since the sugar helps to cut the acidity of the tomatoes I would use another sweetener if you can't have sugar in your diet.
• This dish would also taste really good with whatever spices/herbs you like in a pasta dish.  Oregano, basil, pepper, etc.
• I used medium Cheddar cheese.  Please use whatever sharpness you prefer.  This would also be very good with grated Parmesan. 

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