If you’re trying to lose weight or just want to cut down on calories and carbs, rice cakes are a great alternative to bread. However, when eaten without the benefit of additional flavors, snacking on a rice cake can seem a lot like biting into a handful of Styrofoam peanuts. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be that way. Since deciding what to put on rice cakes can actually impact the success of your entire snack, we have come to the rescue with some tempting ideas.
If it’s summertime and you have some tomatoes that need to be eaten, how about combining them with some fresh basil, mozzarella cheese and a drizzle of olive oil for your own take on Insalata Caprese? In keeping with the Mediterranean theme, a good firm rice cake is also an excellent base for pizza toppings – a sure kid pleaser.
Perhaps you instead want to stay a little closer to home and enjoy a Mexican feel. Accentuate your rice cake with refried beans, cheese and salsa. Adding some avocado to the mix can give you additional creaminess and a serving of those healthy fats you have been hearing so much about.
Let’s say you will be attending a potluck or meeting where appetizers are the order of the day. Contribute your own unique take on rice cake crunchiness by adding an irresistible combination of cream cheese and red pepper or fruit jam. If the gathering instead calls for a dessert, you’ve got that under control with a simple mixture of nut butter and thinly sliced cinnamon apples.
You don’t need to buy pre-flavored rice cakes from the supermarket when you probably have all of the ingredients you need for yumminess right in your kitchen already. The sky is the limit with these versatile, crunchy bread replacers.