Ode to Rice

My love for salt oil rice cannot be underestimated.

In fact, I'm eating some right now as a mid-morning snack with some toasted pecans. I'll eat it again at lunch, with sautéed greens and farm-fresh eggs. And if I'm lucky enough to have anything left over, it might very well end up as a late-night snack, studded with seaweed flakes and sesame seeds.

Growing up in the Midwest to White parents from the East Coast, rice was not really a staple food in our house. If it appeared at all, it was sticky, gluey, usually having boiled over the sides of the pan. It existed for one purpose: to add carbs to soggy casseroles. Plus, my parents bought into the Y2K hype rather severely, and we had a LOT of rice stored in the freezer to eat through in the following years. It was not good rice, not endearing, not comforting. So where did this love come from?

Brazil. And Peru.

I lived in South America for a while, where NOT eating rice was weird. Rice and pasta? Yes. Rice and beans? Yes. Rice and pancakes? Why not? My friends and coworkers taught me how to make good rice, arroz solto, where every grain stood out proud and free. Even in Peru, where the family I lived with made their rice stand up in little towers on the plate, the grains were in a completely different category than what I grew up expecting. No sticky mush.

I had to be taught how to make rice. Re-programmed. Indoctrinated into the kitchen secrets of people who wouldn't dream of a day without it. To do it properly involved precise amounts of water and a proper sauté of the washed grains with a little olive oil, fresh garlic and salt. The final product? A revelation! I don't mean to brag...but at some point, people stopped cooking for me and started letting ME cook for THEM.

My kids are growing up with a different food culture than I did, for sure. We eat rice about 4 times a week, minimum. One of their favorite dishes is a riff on a Brazilian dish called feijão tropeiro that I make with leftover rice, leftover beans, leftover veggies...and a little manioc flour. No one ever seems to get tired of this versatile grain appearing at the table. In the winter, we do risottos, and in the summer, there is nothing easier than a pot of rice and some scrambled eggs with a salad. But sometimes, I'll just make a small, plain pot up and enjoy it warm, unadorned, in all its nutty, salty, carb-y glory.

To make my rice these days, I bought a Comfee rice cooker we've affectionately named Fifi. She can keep stuff warm for 12 hours, and make enough rice to feed a small neighborhood. I've been calling it salt-oil rice, after reading a few Hetty McKinnon cookbooks and loving the way she describes it. Not much has changed since those South American days; my basic "recipe" is still the same.

Rice Cooker Version:

Add a glug of oil and some gorgeous sea salt to the pan. (If I'm feeling like it, I'll do garlic here too. Nicely diced, or just smashed hard and chucked in.) Set the cooker to its sauté function, and add however much rice you need. Cook until it's a little toasty, usually about 5-10 minutes. Add water in the proportions required by your particular machine, reset for the RICE function, and walk away. The rice cooker makes perfect rice a dream, plus I can usually throw some veggies into the steamer basket while the rice is finishing up. A full meal, so much less cleanup, and nostalgia, all rolled into one steaming bowl. That sounds so good...I might need a second helping!

(Note: you can make this on the stove too, just follow the proportions of rice and water listed on the bag. First you sauté, then you add the water, then you cover and cook for the recommended amount of time. And watch out that the pan doesn't boil over!)