Cooking rice * rice pudding

Rice

* 1 c white rice

* 2 c cold water (or broth)

* 1 tsp salt

Combine all the ingredients in a heavy pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Stir once, then cover tightly and reduce the heat to very low. Cook covered for 18 minutes.

Rice Pudding

* 2 or 3 cups cooked rice, cooled (leftover is fine)

* 1 1/3 c. milk

* ¼ tsp salt

* 1/3 c. sugar

* 2 eggs

* 1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 F

Bake 45-50 minutes

Use butter to grease a 9×9 baking dish. In a large bowl, thoroughly mix all ingredients except rice. Add rice and mix well, breaking up any lumps in the rice. Pour into the pan and put in oven. Sprinkle with nutmeg before serving, if desired.

Rice in my rice cooker, before and after it’s cooked:

Rice pudding, before and after it’s cooked (with nutmeg sprinkled over it):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to talk about rice.

This was an episode I had almost finished last year when I stopped making the podcast. It was going to be mostly about Bento boxes and packed lunches, to run in mid-August in time for school starting. I stopped making the podcast because I was frantically trying to get ready for a trip to Ireland, including making and scheduling episodes of Strange Animals Podcast to run while I was gone. Remember when we could go places and have fun with friends in person?

Anyway, things have changed a whole lot since then, so I’m going to dump all the talk of packed lunches and Bento boxes. We’re just going to learn how to make perfect rice. I’ll also walk you through my recipe for rice pudding.

It’s very possible many of my listeners associate rice with tastelessness. That’s because many Americans have no flipping idea what makes rice good and they’re cooking with the worst type of rice possible.

If you don’t already have some rice, you need to buy some. Don’t buy any kind of minute rice or fast-cook rice or boil-in-bag rice or whatever. You want rice that comes in bulk, usually in a bag that holds at least one pound. The cheapest will be plain white long-grain rice. Grab that if you’re not sure what you’re doing with rice, or you can get a little fancier and buy basmati rice, jasmine rice (my favorite), or whatever else strikes your fancy. Or, honestly, whatever is left in the rice aisle. For this episode we’re only talking about white rice, but the same principles apply to brown rice and wild rice mixtures, although wild rice takes a little longer to cook.

The rule for making any grain, like rice or oatmeal, is to use one part grain to two parts liquid. That means if you add one cup of oats to your cooking pot, you need to add two cups of water. This makes it really easy to cook because you don’t need an actual measuring cup. You can literally take a coffee mug out of your cupboard, fill it with rice, dump it in the pot and then add two coffee mugs full of water to the pot and cook it. And it will turn out perfect.

You don’t have to use water, though. If you’re cooking rice for a savory dish, use broth or stock instead of water. Handy hint: if you have a can of chicken noodle soup, you can drain the broth off and use it as part of the liquid for your rice. Then when the rice is done, mix in the chicken noodles part of the soup and eat it with the rice.

One of my favorite easy meals is to make rice with chicken stock, and when it’s done, mix in an undrained can of cooked chicken. Yes, you can get chicken in cans just like tuna. It smells kind of like tuna when you open it. This makes a nice sticky rice that doesn’t require any added salt. It’s perfect for lunches and keeps in the fridge for several days. If you add leftover home-cooked chicken instead, it’s even better. You can also mix in veggies.