Easy Rice Salad

I had some left over cooked brown rice in the fridge. There's at least four things I could do with it, but this time I decided to make rice salad, as my son who was just visiting was raving about a rice salad he'd tried at my mother's recently, and then emulated. The ingredients are flexible - use what you have - but aim for a suitable mix of colours and flavours, with a hint of tang. This turned out really delicious!

Here's what I used:
​Ingredients:
Cooked rice (about 3-4 cups)
One apple
1/2 lemon
1-2 stalks celery
1/2 carrot
Small handful of raisins
A little chopped cucumber
Small sprig mint
​Dressing of choice

Method:
Place cooked rice in a suitably large bowl. Peel* and chop apple into small chunks. Place in a small bowl, and pour over juice of half a lemon. Toss to coat. Add to rice. 

Trim and dice the celery quite small. Peel and grate carrot. Add these and raisins or sultanas to rice, along with cucumber, if using (I added at the end as I was also making natural pickles, and couldn't fit the last 4 slices in the jar). 

Finely dice a small amount of mint (I used about four leaves) and add. 

Select a dressing and pour some over. Stir everything to combine, adding more dressing if needed. Cover and refridgerate for half an hour before serving. 

​For a dressing, a used a combination of two dressings I had in the fridge - Budget salad dressing, and Salad Mate honey mustard dressing (a new one I've found with no egg, gluten or dairy). The Budget one has some egg yolk. I need to go back to making my own dressings, but meanwhile have a number to use up. My son says he used ETA original mayo.

I used about half this carrot, using the rest to make coleslaw

Before adding dressing and mixing

* Keep the apple peels and cores to make homemade apple cider vinegar. It's very easy! I put these ones into a jar in the freezer, which I will keep adding to until I have enough to make the vingar (will post instructions then). Because these are NOT organic apples, the resulting vinegar will be used for cleaning etc, not for consumption. But if they were organic/spray free, then it's easy to make an excellent vinegar for dressings etc. The reason I have put the peels in a jar before freezing, and to which I will add, is that you don't need to defrost them before starting the vinegar, which I want to do in a jar. Getting a frozen lump of apple scraps out of another container and into a jar would be a pain - hence freezing them in the container I will use to start with.