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

[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!