Rice and me, we have a history.
I grew up in the South, where rice is a supper staple (yes, dinner is eaten in the middle of the day and supper is eaten at night). We were a blue plate special family -- a meat and two sides, usually a starch (rice or potatoes in some incarnation) and a veggie. We ate hot food, generally speaking, at two out of three meals, depending on the season.
This is not the norm in these hurry-up-and-wait times we live in here in this city that famously never sleeps. Still, I like to try to stick to the tradition of sitting down to the table -- together -- and breaking bread. And so we do, daily, take our meals together.
And meals for us mean, rice, risotto, couscous, pasta, some form of the beloved carbohydrate. You will not find any proponents of low carb diets in this household.
More often than not, we are eating rice -- yellow rice, arborio rice, saffron rice, rice pilaf, sticky rice, fragrant herbed rice, sweet rice, plain jane white rice.
Rice is nice.
Many of my former loves were big rice eaters and my son's father is Nepali, so wouldn't, couldn't imagine a day without rice or Dal bhat. My son, just back from six weeks in Nepal, is eating in the traditional way -- by hand.
Nothing could be more natural for us than having a rice dish. I prefer yellow rice or saffron rice, and of course, sticky rice bought freshly made and wrapped in banana leaves in Chinatown. My son has a preference for straight-forward, nothing added, white rice.
I am always trying different types of rice, recently bringing home a bag of Thai sweet rice to make coconut rice pudding -- the only English language recipe on the package. Necessity truly is the mother of invention. Out of basmati and jasmine rice and with a son begging for rice balls, I decided to cook the sweet rice like regular rice.
Ah! Sticky rice! Sweet rice makes a delicious bowl of sticky rice. I've always been intimidated by the little sticky rice packets -- leave them to the professionals , I said to myself -- but now the possibilities seem limitless. Now I'll be trying Naw Mai Fon as well as Ho Yip Fan. Good to know there are banana leaves in the frozen food section of my favorite Chinese grocer.
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