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

[glass_icarus]

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

[glass_icarus]

*______* NOM!

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

[inkstone]

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

[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 !!`

[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]

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.

[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.

[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]

omg nommmmmmm!! *____*

[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]

Hee! Er, sorry?? >.>

[glass_icarus]

SAFFRON RICE. &hearts &hearts &hearts

[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*

[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.

[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.

[(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

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.

[glass_icarus]

Mmmmmmm rice noodles!! &hearts

[glass_icarus]

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