Ever eaten something and not been sure if you like it or not? It’s happened to me a few times.
At a Chinese restaurant at Christmas 2006, my then-girlfriend told me I wouldn’t like the seaweed – so it almost became a challenge that I had to have some to see how bad it was.
To this day, I couldn’t be 100% sure I really liked it. It was weird. Kinda salty and crunchy. It somehow tasted like it looked..if that makes sense.
Likewise, I’ve had people give me food before – watch me eat the first mouthful and say “well..do you like it?”, only for me to reply “I don’t know. I’ll tell you in a minute”.
Normally I wind up eating some more, and some more, and sometimes a bit more. Occasionally I’ll eat half the cake/meal/other foodstuff, and still not be sure either way.
Last year, the aforementioned girlfriend cooked me a curry (although remove the rice and I’d have said it was a casserole). She did rice with it, and I don’t think I’d ever actually eaten rice prior to that. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I liked it, so as I was tired tonight and had left it til gone 9pm to start cooking, and as I have chicken in, and I bought some rice before for future stir-frys, and I have Chicken Tonight, I did a repeat of the oriental stir fry (listed on this blog, 16/09/07) but added the rice I should have put in the first time.
Quite simple to cook really. I had no idea when it was ready or what I should be looking for, to tell if rice is “tender”, so I followed the instructions on the packet. I was slightly put off as it was a weird kind of orangey-brown colour to start with. There seems to be a lot of different types of rice, and at the time I bought it, I hadn’t done any research, so grabbed the one that was described as easy to cook.
You seem to wash it in a sieve in cold water, put in boiling water for 12 mins, and wash it again in boiling water. Seemed easy enough although it loses points for making me use a saucepan lid (“cover the rice and leave to simmer”), and because the sieve is a sod to clean. You never seem to be able to get all the bits out of it, and theres always some stuff caught between the handle hoop part, and the meshy part.
I think it turned out alright. My rice with sweet and sour chicken on top, was quite a lot like the picture on the Chicken Tonight jar.
Taste-wise I’m still not sure about rice. I could have happily eaten the meal without it, although it does seem strangely filling, which can be good if I’m not sure I’ve cooked enough, to fill up on.