Baked mint rice with pomegranate and olive salsa

Cooking rice perfectly is one of those things that shouldn’t be complicated but can be surprisingly difficult, for some, to get right. Baking it in the oven, on the other hand, as I do here, is a completely foolproof method (and one that worked, incidentally, when feeding 700 people over two sittings at Wilderness festival in 2017!). This is such a great side to all sorts of dishes: roasted root vegetables, slow-cooked lamb or pork.

To get ahead, the salsa can be made a few hours in