Rice

How To’sday: How to Make Easy, Fluffy Rice

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Yummy fluffy rice

I don’t have a rice cooker. I also don’t let that stop me from making fluffy mounds of rice. And since I appear to be in the mood for cooking dishes that work nicely with this versatile grain, I thought I’d tell you how I go about making a batch of rice quickly, easily, and without anything you don’t already have.

Rice!

Rice, as you know, starts as solid grains with the potential to develop into light, airy morsels of goodness when cooked well. The internet seems to be full of horror stories about rice cooking that turn these grains into batches of starchy paste or edible kernels still solid in the middle and decidedly un-fluffy, and rice cookers are offered as the suggestion for remedying these problems. I learned to cook rice, from my mom, with nothing more than a pot and a lid, and I’ve always been pleased with the result. Plus, the method is really easy: in fact, the hardest part is leaving it alone so the rice can do its job.

Here’s what to do:

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Leftover-Rice Cakes

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Breakfast of leftovers
I don’t really recall eating much rice before I was thirteen. It was then that I had my first delicious bites of Chinese takeout (strangely, in Disneyworld). My sister and I were hooked, so suddenly, stir fry became a regular meal in our household. My dad would bust out a giant wok, a pound of chicken breast, and a smattering of stir fry vegetables, and within minutes the house would fill with the sounds and smells of the quickly cooking meal.

Rice, too, was always part of these week-night stir fries. And it was the rice that yielded the best leftovers, because the following morning, dad would make rice cakes.

Tasty breakfast of rice

Rice cakes, as I grew up with them, are not comparable to the puffy, crunchy discs of rice you can buy at the store. These rice cakes are rather more like pancakes, cooked in a frying pan and slathered with butter and maple syrup to make a scrumptious breakfast.

Whether you make your rice for stir fry, curry, or something like this, make a little extra and you can set yourself up for a week’s worth of awesome breakfasts.

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