Let The Rice One In

I've been doing some research into what types of food one should have stocked in their pantry, or in my case one of my tiny cabinets.  You can do a pretty good search using the internet to find various we lists of well stocked pantries, from pretty basic ten item lists to more classy high brow lists peppered with items like clam juice and red and white wines.

Doing a second search looking more for the cheap, but healthy foods, you can find a pretty big number of lists as well.  No clam juice on these lists though.  There are a couple of things that are at the top of almost every one of these lists if you do a cross reference and statistical analysis.  The first is rice and the second is beans.  So one of the healthiest and cheapest things you can keep around is rice and beans.

Taken together these two items can form a nearly complete diet with a good number of our daily needs accounted for and all of the essential amino acids one needs according to a number of articles I found about rice.  With the variety of rices and types of beans you can have plenty of variety even if eaten with almost every meal, from the red beans and rice of Sir Mix-A-Lot's big bottomed girls to the spicy curried dishes of East Indian cooking. 

Me and rice have been becoming friends, I bought a rice cooker.  You can get a pretty basic model that cooks the rice then keeps it warm till you want to eat it.  Or you can get a model with as many features as an Ipod.  They have models that you can put the rice in before going to work and it will be done and waiting in warming mode for you when you get home.  I opted for a smaller 3 cup model that has one button.   I found it for only $16 at target and it came with a steaming try if I ever want to use it to steam veggies.

One trick you have to learn though is a rice cooker cup is not the same as the cups most of us are use for baking .  Rice cookers use a cup, as defined by the International Rice Association.  A secretive group no doubt in line with the Illuminant and shadowy grain cabals of the world.   The cup that comes with the rice cooker is pretty important if you want to use the measuring lines inscribed in the rice cooker.  A Rice Association cup will give you about  3/4 of the rice a standard cup would give you, using the standard cup would leave your rice more than a bit dry and uncooked compared to what you would expect.

Do the rice thing.