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

[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!