rice three (maybe four?) ways

I've never really been able to make rice. Maybe it's silly, but it's true...I always have all sorts of problems when I try to make regular white rice. I've had better luck with brown rice (except the time when I burnt an entire cup of brown rice to the bottom of a pot). When I was in college I would make (the only thing I actually "cooked") the boil-in-a-bag, which worked fine. But now that I'm all grown up and should make adult white rice, I can't seem to get it right.

So last Saturday, while breaking out a serious sweat playing the Wii with some friends, it quickly approached dinner time (well for Jeff it was WAY past dinner time, being 8:30 pm it was well past his usual early bird special). I had found a red curry recipe that I wanted to try, well, in reality, I found a red curry recipe that I wanted to completely change around and replace most of the ingredients with other ingredients, but I did want the red curry to remain the same. This, however, required making rice. I confinded into my friend that I was village idiot when it came to rice making, but she was no help either, apparently I'm not the only one who has this mental block when it comes to rice making.

So I pulled out the Uncle Ben's (the first time I have even ever bought uncle ben's, I usually get the fancier stuff) box, and to make matters worse, they had instructions for making rice for 2, 4, 6 or 12 people. so I immediately looked at the recipe for 6 naturally (we had 4 people), but this recipe only called for 1.5 cups of uncooked rice, which didn't seem to be like a whole lot. My sous chef (not that I'm a better cook than my sous chef, she just happened to be reading the ingredients to me) agreed, and there was no way to double the recipe for 4 because the water/rice ratio varied for each serving size. Clearly, what made the most sense was to make rice for 12.

When the timer alarm went off, I refused to lift the lid because I was sure there was hard uncooked and mushy grains in the pot. When I finally did open the lid, what awaited me were glorious perfectly cooked rice grains. rice for 12 is clearly the answer!!

So after making our way through a lot of the rice for 12 (and we did eat a lot because the red curry was SPICY), I still had oodles and oodles of rice leftover.

what to do with rice leftovers?

well the first option that I came up with, was rice pudding. I actually thought of it when I decided on making rice for 12 (I think I said "well, I can always make rice pudding with the leftovers"). So last night after dinner (we had hamburgers, nothing at all related to rice), I whipped up a batch of rice pudding. It was tasty and delicious, but only used up a small amount of the leftover rice.

So tonight for dinner I was determined to come up with another use for leftover rice. Again, the choice seemed obvious, fried rice. I threw together a pan of fried rice, which was also delicious, and also did not use up all the rice. never again will I make rice for 12! (one of the funny parts of this whole thing is that the amount of rice that I had in leftovers was probably $1 worth...even funnier if you are reading this after reading the per se entry, in which no single bite of that entire meal probably cost less than $1). It had become a challenge at this point (clearly).

So I e-mailed my friend who got me into this predicament in the first place, and she came back with great ideas! Rice salad, rice stuffing, tomato rice soup (coincidentally that was also the soup in the cafeteria today), stuffed peppers, the list goes on and on. I have, however, been lectured over and over again from my mom and grandma that I must not ever make stuffed peppers with cooked rice. They have only ever made it with uncooked rice and it appears to be the proper polish way. I have yet to make any stuffed peppers because I keep forgetting the recipe (mom, can I get that again from you?). So I won't be making the stuffed peppers, but I will be making yet another rice dish tomorrow for dinner.

anywho. rice for 12. now that I have offered up so many options for leftover rice (well, stole a bunch of ideas and then posted them to my blog as though I came up with them), everyone should be making rice for 12. it may just be the only way to make rice come out at all, unless, of course, you use Toshiba's new $800 rice cooker.