Burned Rice Twice

Burned Rice Twice

I may be the world’s laziest cook. I do know how to make an omelet, and I even took a cooking class in high school called “Bachelor Survival”. The only think I remember cooking was chocolate mousse, and since no one in my group liked how it tasted, I ate five or six servings. I broke out in hives and had to stay home for a couple of days.

I am also cheap. I don’t like to spend a lot for breakfast or lunch. Since I eat lunch at school, I tried cooking potatoes for a while. It was just a plain potato cooked in a microwave, but after a while it got kind of boring.

About this time I realized I probably needed to start eating breakfast more regularly. So here’s the routine I find myself in nearly every day. I like to cook some oatmeal before school since it only takes a couple of minutes. I don’t really like milk, so I only put some maple syrup on it. Oatmeal is supposed to be good for lowering cholesterol and it also counts as roughage, so I’ve done two good things as the day begins.

Continuing in the single food category, I cook brown rice at school. Brown rice take a while for some reason, so this may be the extent of my culinary skills. Five minutes on high, forty-five on medium, and I have a very filling lunch which can be topped with a little salt or a little sugar. That’s right. Nothing else on the rice; no milk, no spices, no nothing.

The rice is another serving or two of roughage, and the argument I offer for rice everyday for lunch is: 3 billion people who eat rice for every meal can’t be too wrong. Here’s the really strange part of the breakfast and lunch scenario. I’ve gotten used to eating this every day, as in I’ve been eating oatmeal and rice everyday for three or four years now. I ought to do a commercial.

Some people make fun of the fact I eat the same thing every breakfast and lunch. But the good news about rice for lunch is it seems to keep me more awake in the afternoon, where I used to fade before I started the routine.

The only problem with being so regular is that the habit sometimes overtakes the logic of what goes into such a simple meal. The following problem happened not just once, but twice. I thought it happened again the other day, but someone else was responsible that time.

Here’s what happened.

Rice is simple. Shake in the hundreds of grains, fill up with water, maybe add some salt and start cooking. But remember, brown rice cooks for 50 minutes; forty-five minutes at medium after five minutes on high. The only time I really have problems with this simple recipe is when I get distracted. Usually, I am talking with someone else, or I have something else on my mind. So I’m trying to do two things at once, and since I don’t want to be rude, somewhere in the conversation I forget one of the steps. There really is no excuse, but at least twice I have tried to cook rice without any water.

If you have never been blessed to smell rice cooked without water for fifty minutes, I can give you a few details to help you understand the smell. Think about toast burned completely through, with some hints of coffee. I don’t think there was smoke, but everyone on that side of the building was sure there was a fire somewhere, but they just couldn’t figure out where.

It’s the worst inside the microwave. I’m just glad it didn’t start on fire. I could see the fire department pulling out my plastic bowl of smoking rice and trying to identify who was the idiot who decided to fry rice in the microwave.

Needless to say, the first time I burned the rice there was a general uproar about the fire which was burning somewhere in the building. Imagine my surprise when I opened the microwave and saw a pile of dark brown burned something. I wasn’t smart enough to keep quiet about it, so everyone made fun of the fact I couldn’t even cook plain rice.

They really enjoyed teasing me the second time I burned the rice. Now I am paranoid. Sometimes I go back and double-check to make sure the bowl has rice and water. A couple of weeks ago I smelled what I thought was burning rice and rushed to the microwave. I had remembered to add water, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Someone somewhere was burning toast. That’s okay.

As long as I didn’t get blamed for it.

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