One thing I've been grateful for with cooking under a tighter budget is dry goods. Rice, beans, lentils, and pasta can often be bought in larger quantities, can have a very long shelf life, and don't hurt the bottom line. Needless to say, I've been eating quite a bit of rice lately.
Now, to be fair, I have a rice cooker. It cost maybe $30, and I've had it for 6 or 7 years now. It's simple to use, doesn't take long, and typically cooks rice better than I can do in a pot. Now, you can just dump rice straight from the bag into the cooker, add water, and let'er rip, but let's face it: that's some shit rice. At the very least, rinse your rice. I usually pour mine into a bowl that I keep under a low-running tap while fondling the rice like a fucking weirdo. I pour the water out when it gets close to the top of the bowl (don't want to overflow and lose grains), and just repeat 3 or 4 times until the water runs pretty clear.
This second thing is not something I do every time: lightly sauté your rice before adding the water in. You can do that in a separate pan or in the pot/rice cooker where you'll be cooking it all. I just add a little oil into my rice cooker, turn it on "Cook" (as opposed to "Keep Warm"), and let the rice puff up a little. It changes the texture, makes it a little "puffier." Obviously, this is optional, but fucking try it sometime.
The third thing: for the love of God and all things that are holy, USE SEASONING! If you don't want to sauté, fine. If you don't want to rinse, whatever. Just put some fucking flavor into your fucking rice, you fucking animal. If you want, just use broth instead of water. If you don't have broth, make some. Chicken broth, beef broth, vegetable broth... hell, I've made shrimp broth and turkey broth before. It's all fucking amazing for rice (or soup or sauce or whatever else you want to use it for).
If you don't want to use broth, that's perfectly fine, but still add some seasoning, and add plenty of it. I generally will at least dump in a bit of salt and black pepper. If you like that yellow rice, you want turmeric. Maybe a pinch of saffron if you're feeling fancy. Beyond spices, you can also add in veggies. I'm a sucker for tomatoes or spinach cooked in my rice. A little garlic, a little onion, a little whatever the fuck... it doesn't matter, just try shit. Experiment. Try weird-ass combinations. Fuck shit up. Worst case: you have a meal that doesn't taste as good as you might like, but that just gives you an opportunity to try to figure out something different for next time.
A good fourth thing to keep in mind about rice: don't underprepare. It takes a little bit to make it; it's far better to have too much rice cooked than too little, and do you want to know why? Because whatever's left can be used later. Now, I'm not proposing that you just nuke previously cooked rice for tomorrow's dinner, but there are other options. My typical go-to is fried rice, for which you want to use leftover rice. However, there are other options. If I'm feeling hungry, especially in the morning, and I have leftover rice and an egg, I'm a big fan of tamago gohan, a Japanese dish where you heat up your leftover rice (I use the microwave as I am not Japanese but am, instead, an uncultured swine), then mix an egg into it. That's it. The heat from the rice cooks the egg (more or less), and you end up with an oatmeal texture. Season that shit, too, by the way. It takes all of a minute to prepare and fills you up pretty well.
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| Pack your rice into a bowl for nifty presentation bullshit |
Fifth, and last for this post (there is so much more about rice, so expect to see me extol its virtues more in the future) but definitely not least: don't eat rice by itself. Trust me. Have something else with it, mixed into it, whatever. You will fuck your stomach up
Throw some veggies on top. Have a little chicken on the side. Mix in an egg. Just put something else in there. I don't remember the exact details because I'm not a goddamn nutritionist, but the basic idea is the starchiness strips the mucus out of your stomach, and you need that shit in there or you'll end up miserable. Google it. I promise I'm not making this up. Or maybe I am. Maybe "Big Not Rice" has infiltrated my mind and implanted false memories. Or maybe just eat some other shit with your rice.
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