Rice Shortage
I confess to being spoiled by the fantabulous selection of cuisine in and around New York City. My family dined out tonight in a Thai place. It wasn’t actually bad, but there wasn’t anything particularly praiseworthy about it, either. No doubt most of the foreign food we sample back home is at least a little adulterated to appeal to the American palate, but here on the cusp of suburban and rural Illinois, foreign cuisine is nothing like authentic.
I’m proud of having mastered the use of chopsticks. Well, I haven’t actually mastered them—I can’t duplicate the efforts of an ex-girlfriend who could handle an egg in shell with lacquered chopsticks—but I’ve at least reached a respectable competence. Part of that education was learning to handle not just the chopsticks, but the bowl, holding it in the left hand, close to the face. You pick a choice morsel or two from your plate, pop it in your mouth, then, holding the bowl very close to the face, shovel a mouthful or two of rice. Although properly sticky rice helps with any technique, the short shovel from bowl to mouth works far better than trying to lift a lump of rice all the way from table to mouth, as Americans are prone to try without practice.
This technique also tends to lead you to eat more rice per unit, um, stuff. You know what I mean by stuff: whatever it was you ordered from the menu that automatically comes with rice, like fries with a burger. One of the easiest ways to recognize whether your Asian dining experience has been Americanized is that you get a little bowl of rice for a big plate of stuff. If you’re handling your chopsticks right, you end up about 25% done with your stuff when you run out of rice. Either you’re left to ask for three more bowls, or pack it up in a doggy bag and take it home to your six-cup rice cooker.
You’ve got a rice cooker, right? Cooks rice like a charm, no muss, no fuss, just right every time with the push of a single button. First- and second-generation Asians already have one, but any of you fresh-out-of-college Anglos take note: this is a terrific device for cheap, easy, and satisfying meals. Stir-fry a bit of meat with a bit of garlic, bell pepper, onion, bean sprouts, or, if you want to get fancy, canned water chestnuts or bamboo shoots. Add soy sauce and MSG to taste. (The MSG is important; without it, your stir-fry won’t taste Chinese.) The basic recipe is readily adaptable to a huge variety of meat-vegetable combinations. Now get a little bowl of rice in your left hand, and practice using those chopsticks. Handling them will become easy much faster than you think.