Awake

Healthy Girl Update: The Rice Disaster Diary

File this one under, "Things My Mother Told Me That I Forgot To Remember."

In Part 1 of our story, I learned that cooking wild barley fancy pants rice in a regular rice cooker does not comply to the normal (easy) rule of 2 parts water, 1 part rice. Cooking wild barley fancy pants rice in a rice cooker in the normal fashion will yield 1 Cup Crispy Rice. What?!

In Part 2 of the continuing saga of cooking rice, I decided to follow the directions on the back of the bag of wild barley fancy pants rice. Mostly. Yeah. The space between "mostly" and "completely" really got me this time around. It asked me (firmly, but gently) to bring the broth, water, and rice to a boil in a "tightly covered pot." Mmm. Tightly covered pot. Well, I don't really have a pot with a lid per se. But, look! I do have this nice ginormous glass measuring cup, and oh! over here I have the lid to my rice cooker. They almost fit tightly! So I poured the ingredients into the ginormous glass measuing bowl and covered it with the lid from my rice cooker. I watched it heat up. All was well. I left the room after a few minutes, moments later, I heard a sound. A disconcerting sound. I went into the kitchen and found this:

Yep. Implosion. I turned off the burner which was now burning the rice that spilled on top of it, opened all the windows downstairs, ran halfway up the stairs, grabbed the smoke detector off the wall and put it in the bookcase at the top of the stairs. At least I defeated the smoke detector!

I'm sure my mom told me at one point in my impressionable youth not to use a glass container on the stove top, but apparently that memory was not to be summoned by my crack staff of neurons in my central nervous system. Ah the lessons we learn...and how we learn them. So amusing, isn't it?

So I'm trying to be healthy girl, cooking my food instead of eating out all the time. I know this obvious to, well, all of you, but let me tell you, one does not learn the finer skills of creating fine (or I'd even settle for eatable) cuisine in the drive-thru of a local fast food restaurant. But one does not grow healthy and strong eating food from strangers delivering food out of windows in the dead of night either. Riiiight. I knew that.

Anyway, I know it now. :)

By the way, thanks to all of you who have stopped to encourage me on my healthy girl quest. Your encouragement has meant a lot!

Happy rice cooking!