Spanish Rice in the Crockpot

I have been getting a real kick out of Stephanie and her blog, A Year of Crockpotting, chronicling her self-professed obsession with her kitchen appliance. Every day Stephanie produces a new slow cooker recipe, mostly meaty stews and soups, but also an astonishing variety of cookies, caramel corn, play dough and vegetarian dishes. Her writing is very funny and the recipes are neatly broken down and have lots of photos to show the assembled ingredients pre- and post-crockpotting.

All of the recipes are also gluten-free. Stephanie uses a lot of naturally gluten-free ingredients and for the baked goods, she uses gluten-free flour mix. The other day I wanted to whip up dinner while we were running around doing several different work/kid/store/garden/dog/cat projects and so I turned to A Year of Crockpotting for inspiration. She had a Spanish Rice recipe which I have modified below for the in-house vegetarian and vegan. Brown rice always takes an preternaturally long time to cook in our house, so the crockpot worked great. The rice came out soft but chewy and soaked up all the yummy sauce.

Spanish Crockpot Rice

2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, diced
6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
4 stalks celery, diced
1 green pepper, seeded and diced

2 cups brown rice
1 (28 oz.) can crushed or diced tomatoes and water to make 4 cups liquid

Couple of glugs of hot sauce (I like Frank's Louisiana Red Hot, the chicken wing sauce)
1 Tbsp. chili powder
Salt and Pepper to taste

Heat oil in frying pan. Add onions, garlic, pepper and celery. Saute until softened.

Dump into large crockpot (mine is 4 quarts). Add remaining ingredients.

Cook on high heat for 4 hours, then turn to low for at least another 3 hours, until rice is done. Stir every once in a while. We actually let it go another two hours, cause noone was home to deal with it. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Top with your favorites: sliced green or black olives, sour cream, grated Cheddar, more hot sauce, sliced scallions.

Serves 6-8.

I am submitting this recipe in Just Get Floury's Dollar Dish Duel, which challenges participants to cook up some grub to feed at least two people for $5. I estimate this recipe cost right around $5, minus the toppings, and this served our family of four one night for dinner, with enough leftovers for another round of meals, so this was a frugal recipe indeed.

There is still time to enter the Dollar Dish Duel, as entries aren't due until May 6th, so get cooking.