Thursday, January 02, 2003

Mundania

Happy New Year! (there, that's said and done...)

So I went to the grocery store and was browsing around instead of just doing my insta-shop (buying the things that I buy every time that I go) and found out that they now package rice in little bags that you can boil. Well, at least I don't remember seeing that 5 or 10 years ago when I used to do more cooking then I do now. I thought it was pretty nifty that you could just drop this bag of rice in a pot and boil it for 10 minutes, making for a fast snack or meal and without the involved process of making rice the old way (not to mention the mess). Makes 2 cups at a go. Price per bag works out to be about 50 cents or so? Not exactly cheap, but really not that expensive either unless you buy the 5lb bag of rice. Big benefit is that it's easy to make, which is a major consideration if I'm having an off-week (when all I want to do is eat ice cream, chips, chocolate mini-donuts and the ilk).

So, rice as re-entered my life as a staple food... and it agrees with my internals much better then the junk food and other low-quality foods that I've been eating. I now have 5 boxes of the stuff sitting in the pantry. I also ordered a microwave rice cooker from The House of Rice store, which would let me make up to 8 cups at a time (I'll have to go out and buy the 5lb bag of rice for that). My hope is that I can make a bunch of rice in one go, and package it up in the fridge for later.

So now the trick is to figure out what I can add on top of the rice to change up the taste... Leading contenders so far are curry powder (works well), sweet-and-sour duck sauce, some sort of sweet-and-sour mixture in a jar with pineapples and other stuff, garlic salt. Just don't mix curry powder and the sweet-and-sour sauce with pineapples - the two different flavours did not combine at all, but rather were at complete odds with each other. I used to just make rice with salt and butter back in my early days, and to this day I'm not real fond of butter on my rice (bleh) but that was how the recipe said to make it. And actually, just plain boiled/steamed rice tastes good to me - the other items that I toss on top are just to try and bring some variation on the theme.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:49 AM