"I like rice.
Rice is great if you're hungry
and want to eat 2,000 of something."
-- Mitch Hedberg
 |
| Sushi rice, brown rice, Arborio rice, white jasmine rice, and sweet brown rice 6-14-14 |
"I now understand how varied the world of cultivated rice is;
that rice can play the lead or be a sidekick;
that brown rice is as valuable as white;
and that short-grain rice is the bees knees."
-- Yotam Ottolenghi
"Rice is a beautiful food.
It is beautiful when it grows, precision rows of sparkling green stalks
shooting up to reach the hot summer sun.
It is beautiful when harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled on diked, patchwork paddies.
It is beautiful when, once threshed, it enters granary bins like a flood of tiny seed-pearls.
It is beautiful when cooked by a practiced hand, pure white and sweetly fragrant."
-- Shizuo Tsuji
I eat a lot of rice.
I eat rice every day, at almost every meal.
I like it all -- white and brown, short grain and long, expertly seasoned sushi rice, perfectly al dente Arborio. I even like it cold, gluey and leftover straight from the fridge.
A hot bowl of creamy rice porridge is the most comforting of comfort foods.
There've been days where I eat nothing but rice.
I grew up on Minute Rice, which, as a kid, I even loved. My mom just made it plain Jane in a square Corning Ware dish, with a pat of margarine melting under the steamy glass lid.
During my high school vegetarian experimentation phase, I'd cook up big batches of brown rice and eat it for supper while the rest of my family ate roasted meat.
I began experimenting with rice varieties during my grad school days. I bought rice in the bulk food section of the grocery store mainly because it was dirt cheap, and I was dirt poor. For pennies, I could eat rice for days and days.
Rice was also a blank canvas where I could get creative and try new things without wasting a lot of money if an experiment didn't work out.
In my life, I've probably eaten a pretty-good sized mountain of rice, and it still isn't boring. There are so many varieties, and so many ways to prepare rice, that the possibilities are literally endless. I always keep several varieties on hand so I can mix it up and keep it interesting. I've tried complicated recipes. I've stirred and stirred and stirred many pans of risotto.
But my personal favorite way to eat rice is freshly steamed in my rice cooker and topped with a sunny-side up, farm fresh brown egg. When the liquid yolk soaks its rich, velvety deliciousness into a mound of soft, pearly grains -- for me, that is as good as it gets.
