How to cook rice
Despite what you read here, this isn't really about cooking rice, or fixing things
Do you know how to cook rice? I mean do you really know? I mean, go into a random kitchen and make perfect rice the first time, know?
The first time my girlfriend/fiancee/wife/partner and I cooked dinner together, one that called for rice, she got out her generic countertop steamer, followed some directions, and voila - perfect rice. Having never experienced the wonder of a rice cooker-like device, I was floored. Chalk it up to ignorance. My siblings and I came of age with very little money and an attendant ignorance of the finer things, kitchen countertop things. Then, I struck out on my own right away and I struggled as a young adult due to that same sort of ignorance.
As is my wont, my ignorance followed me even after I found a way to finish college and get an advanced degree in something technical.
Until the rice cooker moment, I exclusively experienced uneven rice cooking in a pot. My pots of rice never ever came out properly. The rice on the bottom was mushy. The rice at the top was dry or undercooked. I could never get it right. Hell, half the time I ended up burning or browning the rice. My mother’s rice was a little bit better, though infrequent. She lived at sea level, pretty much. That matters, more than a little.
In keeping with my theme about self-trauma, I must be traumatized about cooking rice. It’s true, there was that one time that I put on a pot of rice to cook, left the stove on high to bring it to a boil, forgot about it, came back inside to a house filled with smoke, and spent a long time chipping the rice, that had transformed into little charcoal bits, out of the enameled insides of the pot. The electric burner even left an impression on the outside of the pot on the bottom, where the enamel softened up due to the heat. It took days for the smell of smoke to clear from my apartment.
There were other times when I burned the rice, too. For years, I had a second reminder of my rice failures, a stainless steel pan with little black pits in the bottom, traces of some carbonized rice.
Okay, okay, right, I broke the 2 million-year-old human rule - never leave a fire unattended, along with the 800 thousand-year-old rule - don’t leave your food cooking unattended, all while adhering to the 20 thousand-year-old rule - use a pot. You’d think I’d know better.
I swear, I could never get the water right. I knew the whole add water to twice the level of rice thing. I couldn’t get the heat right. I couldn’t get the time right. I couldn’t make it work perfectly. I watched the pot closely, but somehow, no matter how careful I was, I was never rewarded with good rice.
As I journeyed through my rice cooking traumas, I recalled a time when I lived with a couple who took in boarders. We shared the cooking duties. We all cooked for the lot of us. The couple had a funky hippy pottery steamer rice cooker thing. Someone else always made the rice. Somehow, I was incurious about cooking rice even with the funkadelic cooker. I didn’t pay that much attention to the very decent rice we ate. I was more of a bread person. So okay, cool, nice rice. So can something you don’t care about all that much make a hash of your desires? It’s just rice!
Even years ago, when I used a huge stock pot I scored for a pittance to cook several things stacked in racks in the pot all at once, I was not making the right connections to cooking rice.
I’m so embarrassed about my incurious ignorance — It wasn’t until I lived with the steamer/rice cooker for many years that I started to understand how cooking rice worked.
After making rice in our steamer/cooker, maybe 100 times, the “light” in my head came on. All I needed to cook rice was a bowl filled with rice, the right amount of water, and a covered pot to serve as a steamer with enough water in it to last the proper cooking time. Steam is always at the same temperature, the boiling point wherever you are. I live at an elevation, so my boiling point is a bit low.
I tried this. It worked perfectly. Boring. No surprise! I can cook rice almost anywhere now. Time, steaming temperature, added water, separate the steaming water from the added water, perfect. That’s it. Many things are simple if you know what to pay attention to.
For example, today I went to fetch some stuff from the big box everything for your house place, but when I turned the key in my grocery fetcher, nothing happened. The battery is almost new!? Still, I went to get another battery to jump-start the car. I hooked everything up, but no love. At this point, the most likely problem is something with the starter, but there are things like fuses that can go bad too, so I check those. Still, no love.
At this point, I’m sort of traumatized. I shouldn’t be. I can fix things, and our eldest left their truck at the house, so I can fetch stuff with it. So, off I go. No hitches. Never mind that this truck wouldn’t start just a few days ago. They called me about the issue. I told them to wait and I’d come to their house to check out the truck and make sure it was something simple like the battery. I brought a portable jump starter to their house. Yup, it was the battery.
A couple of days before that our mower wouldn’t start. I also have a timer that stopped working properly. The longer I live, the more shit piles on.
The last time I had starter problems was in the winter decades ago, and the temperature was -10F. I worked on the car in a snow-covered parking lot next to the house where I rented a room. It was dark and the starter on that car had to be pulled from underneath. I had no money to replace the starter, so I had to pull it apart after I got it out and hope that I could figure out what was wrong. In the end, I got the thing fixed, but it took two iterations of putting it back in the car to get everything to go. I didn’t get frostbite, but I was really cold afterward. Calling home was never an option.
I call my partner. I tell her about the car and about how I suspect the starter. We talked about what it would take to move the car to a place where I could work on it. Right now, the vehicle is parked on a side road by our house, half in the ditch. There are other logistics too. Nothing is bad, but I’m still feeling the pain. I hang up.
The dishwasher needs to be unloaded. I start doing that and I decide, right in the middle of the task, I need to see just how hard getting the starter out will be. I search. There’s a YouTube video that pops up. It runs under three minutes. I can pull the offending starter motor, if that’s the problem, out of the car right where it sits. Half in the ditch next to our house, no problem.
I text my partner with the better news.
I wash my hands and finish putting the dishes away.
The next morning, it’s really hard to shake the feeling of doom, along with the giddy feeling this is going to turn out all right. I start removing the stuff in the way, out of the way. I locate the starter and the mounting bolts. I can see that there is no good way to pull it without taking more stuff out of the engine compartment. Then, I spy it. The control wire to the starter is broken (corroded/chewed?) off. There are also chewed wires, rats! Mice! Fuck! I fix the broken wire and the chewed insulation. I make a note of other damaged wires that have been cut for months if not years. How does this thing still run? It’s not throwing codes.
Later, I look at the mower. It has a broken spring that no longer pulled on a lever which disabled an interlock. I fixed the spring. There are other problems. I fix them. Everything works again.
The timer never worked properly. I find a molded part that is out of tolerance and build it up. That’s fixed. (Some things do not have very good quality control.)
Whoo hoo!
Unfortunately, my life is still filled with complications, like people. People don’t come with instruction manuals. Even if people came with instructions, I/we would have trouble making my/our interactions work. Unlike the time I left the rice on the stove and forgot about it, people can sort themselves out. But, I have a history of failures with people, too. I’m still a little traumatized by it all. You think that you know someone? Get real.
Years ago, I started writing to sort myself out. I haven’t had a full-on rice moment yet, or a battery moment, a timer moment, a mower moment, or a starter moment. Not with writing and not with people, though I have come close. Sometimes, I can feel something while writing. With people, I’ve had a few Amanda Palmer moments, just ask.
Years before I started writing, I studied what I thought was a partially written manual for people. I believe the term of art is Psychology. Yeah, that hasn’t helped all that much. There’s also the old-school doctor thing, learn from the dead. I imagine there’s a corollary in psychology, learn from the crazy, which for me translates to, learn from yourself, which is pretty close to the charm over the temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know Thyself”.