Rice, My Old Arch-Nemesis, We Meet Again

I don't think I've ever failed quite so hard at cooking as I did earlier tonight. The meal took a long time, used costly ingredients, and wasn't any damn good whatsoever - and I managed to destroy my friend's wok, to boot.

The culprit, of course, was rice - the rice held everything else up, stuck to the wok, and still wasn't finished long after I had lost my patience for it. How can billions of people subsist on such an obstinate, finicky grain for their daily sustenance? The mind boggles.

Finally, the problem was compounded by the expectations of eight of my friends, waiting to be fed. I didn't just have terrible food, I had a lot of it. Fortunately, my friends are barbarians with no taste, so they didn't particularly care - and for barbarians, they're very polite; the only audible complaints were from me.

This is made even worse when one considers that I've tangled with rice before. Its niceties are not entirely unknown to me. At least, that's what I thought when I started cooking tonight. As with many things in life, there is one correct outcome for rice, and a million failures.

This is the part of the post where I try to make it seem like what I'm writing about is important, but the only conclusion that I can come to is that I suck at cooking rice. Maybe I should... suck less? I'll figure out how to do rice right someday, but I wish I had methods other than "exhaust all possible failures".

As of now, I am formally instituting rice as my culinary arch-nemesis. It's on.

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subatomic waves from the underwater caves