love drowns out hate

[glass_icarus]

Talk to me about rice- the magic of it, the wholeness of it, the surprising sweetness that blooms on your tongue in a slow, lingering mouthful, the flavors that vary between different grains. Talk to me about congee and biryani and onigiri and fan tuan and zhong zi and the crisped scrapings from the bottom of the pot that you can eat with peanut sugar or pour tea over to loosen the grains. Talk to me about mochi and guo ba and the addictive nature of rice crackers. Talk to me about rice.

Comments

[inkstone]

Sweet rice, wrapped in banana leaves, eaten with ripened Cebuano mango for breakfast.

[glass_icarus]

(... from zero to drooling in less than 20 words, ahahahahah! &hearts)

Rice cooked in coconut milk (made me grateful I bought a liter that time :P)!

[littlebutfierce]

My grandpa made the best fried rice ever. No one in my family can get the rice crispy-perfect like he did.

[glass_icarus]

Fried rice! &hearts I love how it's an adventure every time. :3

[meloukhia]

It was raining and I was sick, hadn't been able to keep anything down in days, lying on the floor staring at the wall because moving or thinking, really, anything, made my stomach heave even though there was nothing left, and she brought me congee and cloud ears and a little dish of pickled vegetables. And at first the very thought of food made me quiver inside but 'here try a bite' she said and suddenly I was hungry, actually hungry, for the first time in days, and she laughed and laughed and put the tea kettle on and it hummed in the background while I ate and remembered that sweet, perfect taste of food and felt it reaching deep into my body.

[glass_icarus]

Congee is such a wonderful food, I especially love it when I'm sick.

I've recently been craving the lovely sticky rice wrapped in leaves and steamed with sectioned crab from this one place in Flushing that does it perfectly.

[meloukhia]

(Icon solidarity)

Dang you're making me hungry!

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't realize how much I ate rice until I went to college and had a meal plan freshman year. The dining halls didn't have any rice, of course. Maybe once a week, they would, but it was subpar rice, in my opinion -- large grains that were chewier than I liked and just didn't taste right.

(I was not alone in this. Almost any other Asian American student on the same meal plan that I talked to also vocalized how much they missed and craved rice.)

I like rice when I make it, whether in a rice cooker or in a pot, because I can control how much water goes in and what the texture of my rice is. I like my rice with extra water, just a little softer than most people make it.

I don't know much about different kinds of rice because I usually buy whatever is cheapest or closest or most convenient. I do know that there is the rice I usually end up with, and then the longer, thinner rice that my parents buy on occasion whose smell reminds of restaurants when it's cooked, and then there's the sticky rice that I associate with zhong zi -- and I associate zhong zi specifically with the kinds with dates inside (had to look up what the word was in English just now, so used to calling them 枣子) which of course must be eaten with sugar, ergo my immediate instinct with sticky rice is to add sugar.

I love rice, most especially the way it soaks up flavor so it can taste amazing, or the way I need to have it at every meal, or the way it can be a meal in and of itself if I'm too lazy to cook -- rice and seaweed, or rice and pickled radishes, or rice and anything can be filling if not particularly healthy.

I didn't know I had this many things to say about rice ...

[onehundredmoons.livejournal.com]

College rice was a dismal affair. Wow, I don't think I've thought of that in about 15 years, but it's completely true. *nods*

[glass_icarus]

I brought my own rice cooker (AND rice) as soon as I could get away with it, trufax!

[glass_icarus]

Oh, dining hall rice. I've never understood why USian university school cafeterias don't invest in a freaking pressure cooker, it's not THAT hard to make properly! *g*

[meloukhia]

Oh, EGADS. One of my undergraduate institutions had a 'stir fry station' with a substance that I resolutely refuse to recognise as 'rice.' It was an insult to all the myriad and delicious ways in which rice can present itself.

[trinker]

Really? pressure cooker? I loved using a pressure cooker when I was living on the boat, but I've never used one for rice.
`

[glass_icarus]

... crap, do I mean pressure cooker?? @__@ Maybe not! I was thinking about my old-school rice cooker, which has nesting pots and can also double as a steamer (and toaster, if you just slap bread on the dry bottom and hit the switch).

[inkstone]

Ugh, university rice. I coped with it first year since I was living in the dorm at the time but when I moved into the apartment second-year on, I totally brought the rice cooker with me.

[(Anonymous)]

Risotto... short-grained Arborio rice, toasted in melted butter with chopped onions and pancetta. Add the chicken broth in small batches, stirring as you go. It gets soupy and wonderful, and you can make is as sticky/dry as you want. Finish with copious amounts of freshly grated parmegiano reggiano and I'm in my happy place just typing that.

[onehundredmoons.livejournal.com]

That was me.

[glass_icarus]

It took me AGES to get the appeal of risotto, and the time it finally clicked was the time a family friend and I made it ourselves, hee! Texture control is vital. ;)

[onehundredmoons.livejournal.com]

I don't eat risotto out, either. Agreed on the texture – I don't like it overly wet. It cracks me up a little bit that you can get risotto very fancy-schmancy-like at restaurants, because for us growing up it was just comfort food.

[vass]

Music is an ingredient in risotto. I can't make risotto without music playing while I stir, stir, stir, slowly adding the liquid over a whole hour of cooking, never moving away from the saucepan. And in the end it is so shockingly creamy considering that I didn't add any dairy, just olive oil, vegetable stock, onions, garlic, and tomato passata.

Rice in a tofu skin, with sesame seeds, so perfect it doesn't even need soy sauce. I think that was a form of onigiri, but it's been a while since I had it, and I can't remember.

Turkish buttered rice.

Jollof rice, which I've never tried, but very much want to, because rice with tomato paste and chilis sounds like something I need in my life.

[glass_icarus]

Oh!! The rice in tofu skin pockets are called... inarizushi, I think? I can't remember what my parents called it, ahaha, I always thought of them as pockets. Onigiri is wrapped in seaweed.

Oh man, ever since eccentricyoruba posted about jollof rice I have been SO CURIOUS. *____* Must try it someday!

[vass]

Yes, inarizushi! So delicious.

[trinker]

Inarizushi is already sweet, and is not a nigiri or makizushi osy and wasabi experience!

OMNOMNOM o-inari-san...my mother likes to make it with soft stewed (redcooked?) carrots and bamboo shoots and shiitake, simmered in sweet soy/sake/sugar glaze, mixed into the rice.

[glass_icarus]

omg nommmmmmm!! *____*

[ciderpress]

RICE! NOMMY. I would say something profound but er, I have no profundity. My favourite rice is the 전복죽 my mother makes me when I'm happy or sad or good or bad. I am going to be eleven forever and ever and ever.

I also had the world's laziest omuraisu for dinner tonight, took a picture to oblige you, bb.

[glass_icarus]

EEEEE, THOSE PICTURES!!! &hearts &hearts &hearts Nom nom nomuraisu! :3

[ciderpress]

:3 it was sososo nomraisu!!!

[troisroyaumes]

Ahhh, omuraiseu, my mother would make it for me for breakfast and write my name in ketchup on top of the egg! <3

[ciderpress]

my mother once drew miffy, hee. ketchup miffy, YAYS! <3

[trinker]

OMG Rice.

25 years ago, at boarding school, there was no microwaveable shelf-stable rice. Just boil-in-the-bag vacuum packs. And I would hoard those, along with boil-in-the-bag Japanese-style curry, for those days when I just couldn't take the dining hall's offerings anymore. My mother used to send them in care packages.

I have introduced a long string of partners to the joys of good Japanese rice, and every single one of them became more of a partisan than I ever have been myself.

The one woman I know who claimed an inability to eat rice is one of the few that I had *that* level of conflict with offline...

I could talk about rice all day, and may come back later to do just that!`

[glass_icarus]

Riiiiiiice. &hearts Also :O, I've never cooked rice in the microwave! I used to run to my friends who had rice cookers in college instead (when I was in housing that didn't allow for me to have my own), but I think I mostly suffered BAD RICE in freshman year, except for the times I went home or my mom swung by to visit.

[trinker]

I know it's theoretically possible to cook rice from raw grains in the microwave. I may even have attempted it at some point, but I don't remember it.

I don't think reheating counts. But those shelf stable things? Amazing.

We weren't allowed any appliances other than what the dorm supplied in common areas. I kind of wish I'd pushed for a rice cooker, but I was deeply in mostly-assmilating mode then.`

[suaine]

My family are potato people to the bone, but I've always had a deep love for rice, despite the cheap, cultureless kind my mother used to buy. Now our cupboard is stocked with rice for sushi, wild rice, basmati and thai and once I can convince my mother that a rice cooker is essential, I think I shall be perfectly happy :)

[glass_icarus]

Rice cookers! &hearts I mean, it is obviously possible to cook rice without one, but I for one have never done it- I've never been without a rice cooker. (Except for college, as noted above, when Things Were Sad. *g*)

[lady_ganesh]

Hubby and I bought ourselves a rice cooker for our anniversary one year. WE HAVE NEVER REGRETTED IT.

[boundbooks]

I could eat rice until the heat-death of the universe.

Rice can be sweet; that flavor when you roll it around in your mouth and chomp on it until it's more a delicious creamy concoction than its own little grains. My favorite rice to do that with is Nishiki rice.

Rice can be filling. It fills the spaces between the fried egg and the peas in fried rice, not always deep golden brown like the stuff from buffets, but light enough to just be heated and golden with flavor.

Rice can be comforting. The rice cooker is a faithful friend and will never betray you - unless something completely untold occurs, like making rice and forgetting about it for two weeks - and produces fluffy rice regularly on those days when the very thought of extensive cooking makes one want to go to sleep.

Rice re-heats nicely. It can come back over and over again as a faithful, delicious friend for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Rice pops up in many places. In casseroles heavy with canned mushroom soup, on top of burritos, underneath curries, wrapped around fish, hidden under black beans, and many more than I could recount.

Rice is fantastic.

[glass_icarus]

OMG BURRITOS, ahahaha, how could I forget!!! Burrito rice is so good too, with the flavors of the beans and the meat bleeding into it. &hearts

[such_heights]

Rice! <3 Right at the top of my list of comfort foods - whether it's pea and mushroom risotto cooked for me by my dad, the supermarket basic range that nonetheless tastes fantastic if I cook it right and add the right ingredients, sweet sticky balls of rice to mix in with Thai curry at my local restaurant, or egg fried rice from the takeaway down the road. NOM.

[glass_icarus]

SUCH a comfort, homg. &hearts

[trascendenza]

My mother has given me my great-grandmother's clay pot; it's hardly still in one piece and I know that eventually it'll split down the middle one day, but it's so beautifully worn in and so flavorful that I'm going to use it until that day. For years I couldn't get the hang of cooking rice in a pot because my mother's means of measuring was to eyeball it or measure it with her finger ("But my fingers aren't the same size as yours, how can I use that method?" "It's close enough!"), but in the past five years or so I've experimented enough that I've figured out how to do it with the pots I have at home. Can't lie, I kinda feel like a bamf every time I manage to make delicious rice without measuring anything!

And there are few things better in life than the smell of juk when it has reached that perfect cooking point, on the second day of the sweet rolling tumble when I open up the lid and the fragrance of slightly toasted brown jasmine rice rises up in a waft of steam.

In conclusion: THIS POST IS MAKING ME SO HUNGRY AND SO HAPPY ALL AT ONCE.

[glass_icarus]

asd;flajs bb that makes me so happy, I can't even. A clay pot is such a glorious inheritance!! :3

[trascendenza]

trufax, I'd rather have this than a wedding dress or jewelry or whatever! This I can get years of tasty use out of!

[inkstone]

Ah ha ha, the finger method of measuring rice and water in a pot! My dad taught me that.

[trascendenza]

Knuckle marks the spot!

[troisroyaumes]

All the varieties of 떡!

[glass_icarus]

So pretty!!!! *______*

[bossymarmalade]

Dry long-grained rice cooked into pelau, caramel-coloured from all that burnt brown sugar and Golden Ray cooking margarine and ketchup (enough to make you westerners wrinkle up your noses, but you, you don't make use of these seasonings and flavourings the way we diasporados do, the way we wrangle them from unhealthy/fatty/cheap into something to nourish and soothe us), sweetly conveying along red beans and carrots, pigeon peas and those small cubes of stewed beef, small so everybody gets a taste as the pelau is scooped out of the pot and shared around.

Soft, sticky, steaming white jasmine rice that squishes a bit in your fingers, a too-hot bed under fried-and-curried fish with pieces of green mango cooked in, the flesh slipping apart in delicious sour melting, the rubbery skin to be snapped into pieces that will provide a blissfully toothsome counterpart to unctuous fish mixed with soft pearls of rice and eaten from the hand, licked from the fingertips, mouth watering even with the last morsels.

Rice slick with oil and soy, chased around with cream-coloured plastic chopsticks to be eaten with satisfied, greedy bites of lap cheong and nibbles of slightly bitter baby bok choy, sticking to the sides of the dish it's been steamed in until you scrape it off with the metal spoon, each and every grain precious and delicious and springy in a way that the rice you cook at home never is.

Big takeout containers of yang chow fried rice, heaped high and fragrant and faintly yellow, with its jewel studs of char siu pork slivers, little emerald peas and orange carrots, lazy threads of canary-yellow egg and busy hoops of scallion, big luscious curls of shrimp, and best of all those random mouthfuls of stuck-together rice, soft and white and un-broken-up, somehow infused with the scent of hot wok oil and the suggestion of all the flavours around it without actually having touched them, like a secret little gift every time.

[glass_icarus]

*FLAILY HANDS OF FLAIL*, especially at this line: you don't make use of these seasonings and flavourings the way we diasporados do, the way we wrangle them from unhealthy/fatty/cheap into something to nourish and soothe us. &hearts

-- also have I mentioned lately that I love the way you write about food? BECAUSE I DO.

[bossymarmalade]

♥ RIGHT BACK ATCHA, DUMPLING! This was a fantastic idea, all of these gorgeous ricey comments to read.

Also, the dishes I chose to describe require some skill at preparing, but to be honest sometimes I just want to eat leftover rice hot with butter and sliced-up hotdog in it, lol!

[crossedwires]

Rice goes with EVERYTHING. *noms*

It's family, it's home, and a constant at every meal. And makes everything taste better.

[glass_icarus]

It really is home! &hearts

[inkstone]

Hot rice, fresh from the pot, mixed with a fried egg whose yolk is barely, barely cooked -- the outer layer holds together but when you prick it with a fork, it runs out -- and served with a couple pieces of longganisa.

[glass_icarus]

I haven't quite been converted to the glories of runny egg yolks, but the soft-centered ones? OM NOM NOM. <3333

[inkstone]

I don't like the runny egg yolks by themselves but served with piping hot rice and mixed in? YUM.

[busaikko]

Our favorite restaurant serves kama-meishi, rice cooked in individual-sized pots (kama) with dashi, vegetables, chicken, whatever you want. It's cooked traditionally, so the edges of the rice that touch the pot come out lightly browned and crispy, which is called okoge, and my kids love it. Mmm, so good!

[busaikko]

Heh, and this post just reminded me to get off the computer and go cook the rice for breakfast and lunch! Had to open a new 10kg bag. Somehow, we eat a lot of rice!

[glass_icarus]

*______* NOM!

Haha, yeah, we don't buy rice if it's not in bulk!

[trinker]

Have you seen how much they ask for koshihikari in the "ethnic foods" section of some mainstream U.S. stores?! $9/lb. !!!


I buy it in 15lb bags, at ~$25 if I can, these days a little more than that.


-$9- O.O !!`

[glass_icarus]

ARGH. Yeah, there's... more than one reason I won't buy rice from non-Asian supermarkets.

That price, aside from being RIDICULOUS, is obviously predicated on the assumption that rice is not a staple food in the way pasta is.

[littlebutfierce]

Ahahaha, I saw a recipe on a South Asian writer's blog a long time ago that listed rice amounts for white people & for brown people. SO TRUE.

[trinker]

o.O

I can substitute labels for those categories and join in the laughter...

I don't know that I get to count myself as "brown". Hmm.`

[littlebutfierce]

At the time I got the impression they were using "brown" to mean "anyone who wasn't white" but... it was years & years ago, so I could be misremembering. But yeah, nevertheless could be widely applicable!!

[trinker]

Oh, you can buy long grain stuff for much less!

But the "sushi rice" and especially the "koshihikari" is priced like arborio, as a premium luxury good.

I used to make fun of Chinese businessmen who would travel around the world and only eat Chinese food, but living away from Asians for extended periods has shown me that I have a certain comfort level of "time away from rice" myself. (Thankfully, Chinese and Korean food scratch most of that itch as well, except when it's been too far whitewashed for my tastes.)

I think I've mentioned that it was *me* during my marriage that argued for having more varieties of rice aboard. When I first married my husband, he had 5 different kinds of rice in the pantry. And then I made koshihikari, and he wanted to get rid of everything else. But pilaf tastes *wrong* with sticky rice!

[puckling]

Okay, now I'm just hungry.

[glass_icarus]

Hee! Er, sorry?? >.>

[yasaman]

This is timely, as I am eating rice right now! Basmati rice, long-grained and fluffy, made perfect with just the right amount of rosewater and a pinch of saffron. The rosewater and saffron don't seem to add much to the flavor, until you make some rice without them and suddenly your whole dish is lacking. The aroma of the rosewater and saffron when the rice has just finished cooking, and all that fragrant steam comes out...that is like the platonic ideal of rice for me.

[glass_icarus]

SAFFRON RICE. &hearts &hearts &hearts

[unavee]

This post is making me hungry.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are from the many times my dad would tease my little sister for being a bottomless rice pit. When he cooked, he'd make sure everything had extra sauce so she could drench her rice in it. And the leftover rice, she'd eat with soy sauce and butter.

[glass_icarus]

Heee, we tease my dad about being a bottomless rice pit! Also we thought it was hilarious the time he went to Switzerland on a business trip & made practically nothing but xi fan and scrambled eggs, but I have a little more sympathy for the rice-craving, post-undergrad dining halls. *g*

[vi]

When I think about rice, I think of how soothing it is to wash it. The crunch of it against the palms of your hands, sifting it through your fingers, trying to lose as few grains as possible to the sink. I think of Lak Chim’s exasperation at her mother’s insistence that rice should be kept with black tea leaves mixed through; it meant my aunt had to wash out the leaves each time she cooked. “I’ll never do this again, even if she says something,” she confided. Our family pantry was besieged by moths and weevils, and my parents washed kilograms of rice and laid it all on tablecloths in the sun, flat pools of white on the pavement drying slowly. Because, they reasoned, who could waste that much rice?

This too is soothing: Making a perfect bowl-shaped mound of plain rice tumble with a fork; a large spoonful of rice mixed into soup; the swirl of coconut milk through pulot hitam, black-purple glutinous rice punctuated with pandan; heaping rice into each of my family members’ bowls in turn; Sa Chim’s Hainanese chicken rice on church camps, so famous and fragrant and ritual that we could expect chicken porridge for breakfast the next day; soft egg yolk seeping into rice; scraping the last of the rice from the bowl – because if you don’t clean up completely, you or your partner will have pimples equal to the number of leftover grains! – and smiling at the memory of 奶奶’s serious face.

[glass_icarus]

&hearts &hearts &hearts :3

(Mmmmm, Hainanese chicken rice!)

[mercredigirl]

Rice noodles: bee hoon, and chor bee hoon, I never even thought about how even the noodles I eat are rice, until I went to northern China, where the staple crop is wheat, and I was a flabbergasted southern girl. I adore chor bee hoon, whether it’s in laksa, Chinese-addled tomyam (basically a variation of suan-la soup with another name tacked on!), or beef noodles.

Oh, and chicken rice, flavoured with stock!

When I go to college I am definitely bringing a cheap $50 rice cooker.

[glass_icarus]

Mmmmmmm rice noodles!! &hearts

[mercredigirl]

I have also been reminded that I missed out bee tai bak!

[st_aurafina]

My Nonna makes a sweet rice cake, where she boils it in milk with nutmeg and sugar until it's thick, puts that into a pastry shell, and bakes it all in the oven until it is solid. It's sweet and kind of toothsome in texture, and I guess it must be a festive dish because she only ever makes it at Christmas. We eat it cold, and I'll always associate it with hot Australian summers. Cool and smooth in my mouth, while it's roasting hot outside.

[glass_icarus]

Ooh, that's a new kind of rice cake to me! :D

[(Anonymous)]

I had to have a rice cooker before leaving home. Laptop, car, rice cooker. Delicious rice, steaming gently, ready to grate cheese over, pour on soy sauce, rice vinegar, chili oil. The vigorous bubbling in the pot. The cloud of fragrant steam. Rice with blue cheese dressing wrapped in a crust of sourdough bread. Under chicken that has been cooked over alder coals. Leftover rice filling out the leftover half bowl of soup. Washing rice and looking for the stones. My father, learning how to cook rice as he and the grad students under his wing exchanged recipes and languages. Learning what not to do with chopsticks. Swearing helplessly at a post-college roommate as he left his upright in the bowl in a restaurant. Pausing to calculate how much rice to how much water, *really*, teaching the brother of my heart. I think I can get another ten years out of the rice cooker easily, maybe twenty or more. One handle is cracked now, but that rice cooker is the symbol of my independence.

azurelunatic, who needs to get better at remembering passwords

[glass_icarus]

OM NOM NOM. :9

[mercredigirl]

Oh, hi, azurelunatic! I hope you get the password thing sorted! :)

porridge memories

[(Anonymous)]

This post and subsequent comments not only made me hungry, but also brought a flood of memories about bubur in Indonesia, arroz caldo in the Philippines, the fabulous congee/juk breakfast buffets in China, and late night porridge in San Francisco Chinatown.

Re: porridge memories

[glass_icarus]

:D!!