Rice to the occasion

I’m currently reading Julie & Julia, written by Julie Powell about her pet Project – cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of a year. An admirable effort, and I take my hat off to her especially when you have to deal with bits of animal that you are not generally accustomed to.

I reached the part where Julie has to prepare rice, and an online debate ensues on her blog about relying on modern gadgets (i.e. the rice cooker) vs. the traditional way of cooking. I wondered about that, and concluded that I couldn’t decide which side of the line I was on. By sheer coincidence, I had decided to make a Chinese dinner during the weekend which more often than not calls for a big, steaming pot of rice, and my encounter with my own modern gadget got me thinking about this argument.

So I’m making this Chinese dinner, because I like Chinese and because it is the mid-autumn festival a.k.a. mooncake festival, on the Chinese calendar. If you’re in China, or a predominantly Chinese country, this festival is a big thing. People go to town with this, almost like a second Chinese New Year. I decided that this at least warranted a decent meal and set about making a steamed chicken with ginko nuts wrapped in lotus leaf, tofu with egg gravy, and mixed vegetables with wolfberries and lotus root crisps. It sounded absolutely simple when it was a seed of an idea, but come execution time and I was like a headless chicken running about the kitchen. I was behind time, and my tofu had not turned out as I hoped it would be. Whatever confidence I had at the start of prep sort of crumbled away with the minutes. Anyway, just as I thought I had things under control and was about to pop the chicken into the wok for a steam, I realised I had forgotten about cooking rice.

A little background here. I recently acquired my little rice cooker. I didn’t do it for my benefit, as much as it has been great help. Nooo... I acquired it more for the other half really, so that he’d be able to cook rice when I wasn’t around (something he has yet to do!). It isn’t difficult, and it is rather cute, with its little beeps and blinking lights. Rice cookers have evolved from the white / olive green aluminium standard, with the spring button. Nowadays, you can program (program, mind you!!) the cooker to do all kinds of things, even bake a cake apparently (nope, not tried that yet). In any case, a rice cooker is a pretty “new” thing to me as I’ve been brought up to cook rice the traditional, manual way. It is dead simple. Just chuck the rice into a pot, and fill it up with enough water to reach the first notch of your middle finger when you stand it upright on the surface of the rice. Then leave it to boil and watch the heat till it starts drying out and crackling a little, like rice krispies. Then plonk the lid on and turn off the heat. Easy-peasy, and takes much less time than a rice cooker.

These days however, I use the rice cooker. I might as well since I forked out a decent amount of moolah for it. The thing is, with manual cooking you’re always reminded that you have a pot there that needs washing. With the rice cooker, these things can escape you, and it did. I forgot I had remnants in my cooker from a previous dinner, and it was three weeks later that I discovered I had forgotten to clear it out. The rice, as you can imagine, was in some stage of fermentation, probably would’ve turned into rice wine if I had left it longer. But it was bad. Real bad. It had changed into some shade of pink, secreted its own liquids, and smelt so rancid I had to hold my breath through the entire clearing process and Febreeze the kitchen after that. And all this happened while I was doing the headless-chicken-chasing-time thing. See, when shit hits the fan it tends to be quite a big splat isn’t it?

With the clock ticking, I decided that I’d have to resort to the old way of cooking. There was no way I was going to cook in that rice cooker without a good intense soak first, and there was no time. Funnily enough though, I surprised myself by discovering that it was like second nature to me, that to a certain extent I preferred cooking rice this way. Yeah the gadgets work well thank you very much, but I liked that I wasn’t at the “mercy” of automation, making sure I had programmed the right buttons etc.

I managed to serve a decent dinner that night, with enough fluffy rice for seconds. And as for Julie’s debate, I concluded that while I don’t mind being on the gadget side of life, where convenience rules, I think I’m pretty much old school. And I’m comfortable with that.