Variation on a Brown Rice Theme

I realize I've sung the praises of the easiest Baked Brown Rice recipe in an earlier post, but I feel the need to return to the scene of the crime.  This brown rice recipe continues to be a staple.  It's low-intensity, is super tasty, goes with anything, and really can be dressed up with just about anything.

Tonight, as with my earlier post, I have added chopped button mushrooms.  I continue to be lazy here and buy the pre-cut ones.  I really should get more bang for my buck by buying the whole ones, but the concept of standing over my sink brushing the dirt off of them strikes me a having the potential to reduce my motivation to zero.  What can I say...I know my limits.

And, as before, I am going to add half (if not more) of a regular, normal, everyday, yellow onion.  I have added red onion for a little bit of color once.  With the time in the oven, the taste difference is minimal, and the color sort of loses it's luster. However, instead of red, we're going for the other Christmas color - green.  I'm going to dice up some zucchini and add it into the mix.  I love zucchini raw or cooked, so the way I figure, it will be hard to mess that up from my perspective.

I might have gotten a little carried away with the veggies this time (this is probably the most I've ever put in there), but we'll see how the brown rice reacts.  I've got a half diced medium yellow onion, about 1.5 cups of roughly chopped button mushrooms, and 1.5 roughly chopped medium zucchini. I'm certainly not worried about it tasting good.  I'm worried about the brown rice not getting to soak up as much of the buttery, salty, boiling water as it should while it's in the oven.  But then again, both the onions and zucchini should give off some moisture as well, so maybe it will balance it out?

Normally, I double the recipe when I put it in a 13x9 baking dish, but there have been times that when I add veggies to that recipe, it gets awfully close to the top of the dish.  This time I did just one recipe (not doubling) since I put so much else in the dish.  Before I wrapped it up in foil, it certainly looked promising, even if I've got at least twice as many veggies as I do rice.

Now...to wait for 1hr.    tick tock.

Good news.  It looks delicious.  I will have a bit of it tonight, but then I'll dish it up to be servings