13 Simple Rice Recipes For Easy, Inexpensive Dinners & Sides

This recipe from Damn Delicious only requires seven ingredients and is ready in 15 minutes. Just cook your rice, mix in some lime juice and salsa, top with beans and cheese, and bake until it’s perfectly melty. What more could you want, really? It’s easy to add ground beef or chicken to if you have it on hand, but it’s just as tasty as is.

Want something light and fresh for dinner? Averie Cooks’ mango lime chicken should do the trick then. Her recipe calls for packaged pre-cooked rice, but you could obviously sub in whatever kind you have on hand. Either way it’s going to catch all that delicious homemade mango sauce, which is all that matters.

My usual complaint with rice is that I just never know how to jazz it up enough to make it appealing. Enter Princess Pinky Girl’s souper rice. It’s a risotto-esque dish made with rice, cream of chicken soup, chicken broth, and parmesan cheese — the perfect side or base for so many things.

Budget Bytes’ recipes are fantastic when you’re trying to, well, budget, because the ingredient list breaks down how much everything costs. And for a seafood dish, this one is pretty inexpensive because it uses frozen shrimp, which are perfectly delicious in a dish like seafood paella. This one takes about 50 minutes start to finish, but a lot of that is just simmering time.

If you want all the flavors of an egg roll without the difficulty of fussing with wonton wrappers, just replace them with rice. All The Healthy Things’ recipe explains how to nail the flavor profile “filling” and serve it over some good old white rice.

Fried rice is so good, and adding pineapple might be the only way I can think of to make it better. Damn Delicious’ recipe will explain how to make it perfectly at home so you never feel the need to get takeout again. You could easily top this with chicken or beef for a more filling dish.

A cheesy casserole is perhaps the most comforting thing you could put on the table for dinner, in my opinion. This chicken, broccoli, and rice casserole from Averie Cooks is ready in 30 minutes because it comes together in one the stovetop instead of in the oven.

It’s a classic for a reason. Averie Cooks’ red beans and rice is so flavorful and makes so much food, you’ll be enjoying leftovers for days. It takes about 20 minutes to prep but over an hour to simmer, so this is not a busy weeknight meal. That said, it’s an easy one to pop on the stove on a weekend and let it do its thing while you do yours.

All The Healthy Things’ orange chicken meatballs are a great way to add flavor to ground chicken, and satisfy a takeout craving at home. Serve over white rice, top with green onions, and call it good. Her recipe also explains how to make them ahead and freeze them, if you’re someone who likes to cook in big batches. (You could use them in her spicy vindaloo meatballs in the future, because they look pretty good too.)

There are a ton of ways to do beans and rice, but I’d never considered churching them up like this. Budget Bytes’ recipe works as a vegetarian dinner or you can add the protein of your choice. Either way, you’ll be enjoying a really savory, satisfying dish in about an hour (50 minutes of that time is spent simmering, don’t worry).

Sushi bakes have gone viral on Tik Tok before because it’s a way more accessible way to make a sushi-like dish at home when you don’t have to perfectly roll it up to eat it. Princess Pinky Girl’s recipe could be made less expensive by subbing in imitation crab meat, or waiting until there’s a good sale on the real thing.

You could serve me French onion roof shingles and I’d gladly gnaw on them, but it never occurred to me to make French onion rice. Princess Pinky Girl’s recipe is still so cheap to make and is so easy — you just stick the uncooked rice and other ingredients in a baking dish and let the oven do the work. We usually keep a rotisserie chicken in the fridge anyway, and I could see myself throwing that in here and topping with some cheese for an easy lunch.

Knowing how to make a quick and easy mushroom rice is automatically going to make any protein you serve with it so much more enjoyable. Budget Bytes’ recipe is simple, fast, and super inexpensive — she recommends serving it with pork tenderloin or baked chicken thighs (yum).