Green Rice

Green Rice, which was not extremely green, was extremely yummy. If you figure you are adding equal parts cooked rice, cheddar cheese, eggs and milk, with three-quarters of a cup melted butter thrown in for good measure, it would be impossible to produce anything that was not yummy. It makes sort of a rice souffle type thing. It was great.
If someone else steams the rice ahead for you, it is very quick to make. I made this on Martin Luther King's birthday after trekking to Ikea to buy furniture for my brother. While MLK's birthday is a school holiday, it is also a day that people like to volunteer. My principal, never one to turn down additional hands, signs our school up to receive volunteers. I personally think it's kind of embarrassing for volunteers to show up ready to work, and there not be anything for them to do because the teachers are not there to direct them.
So, I spent 4 hours in my classroom overseeing six wonderful, cheery individuals who straightened out my classroom library, sat at computers and determined the reading level of at least some of the books, filed kids' papers and stuck a bunch of MLK stuff on the wall. So I was pretty well beat by the time it came to make dinner. In fact, when we got to the bed department at Ikea, I crawled onto one of them and left my daughter to help my brother decide what kind of bureau he wanted.
The rice was so delicious that after dinner, while Bob and I were cleaning up, we kept dipping into the leftovers until it was all gone. My son liked it too. By the way, this is not a New England dish, but a product of that great rice producing state, Nebraska. It is also a good way to use up some of the left over bunches of parsley you would have if you were trying to cook your way through the cookbook. It goes very well with Vermont glazed ham, or any other kind of ham, or pretty much anything else in the meat line for that matter.

Green Rice

2 cups cooked rice
2 cups grated Cheddar cheese
1 cup chopped parsley
3/4 cup melted butter (I used half a cup in the interests of our expanding waistlines)
1 onion finely chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 eggs lightly beaten
2 cups milk

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine the rice, cheese and parsley. Heat the butter in a skillet and saute the onion in it until tender. Add to the rice mixture and toss.
3. Season mixture with salt and pepper. Combine the eggs and milk and pour over rice mixture. Bake forty-five minutes or until set. Serves eight.