Why I don’t cook or: Why people must use rice cookers

Sunday night I had dinner with friends–it was a pitch-in Tex-Mex night with my “cooking club” friends. Anyway, I made Texas Caviar (no, no fish eggs), which was a yummy, chop/marinate recipe. No baking, no cooking–just chop and refridgerate.

Over dinner, I was joking that I don’t cook anymore–seriously, if anything has more than 3 steps, I can’t complete it in a timely manner. I still “make” most of our food, but I find myself using prepackaged things, lots of casseroles, things that don’t require a lot of one-on-time with me. Here is an illustration as to why this is so:

Because I had leftover Texas Caviar and left over chicken, I was going to make a burrito bowl sort of thing–“all” I had to cook was the rice, mix in the chicken and Texas Caviar and viola! Dinner would be DONE!

Apparently, rice requires too much effort. I put the rice and the water in the pan, covered, and put on to boil. A few minutes later, M wanders upstairs and I follow.

I see the humidifer filters that I’d just purchased, so I go about changing the filters.

I find *mold* in her humidifer tray, so I immediately start Lysoling the hell of out it, grossing out and kicking myself (“maybe that’s why she’s got a cold now?”).

M wanders into her room, and starts to open a drawer to decimate it (a favorite activity). I start hearing the lid on the pot shake and think “Time to go downstair to check on the–what was I cooking?–oh, the rice!” Great. Pick up M to get her to go with me, she hits me (other favorite new thing).

So I try the, “no hit/gentle” routine to no avail–she justs continues to hit me–and SMILE.

I then think I’m starting to smell something…..something not really like rice. I grab her and run downstairs…..and the downstairs is a bit smoky and smells “burned”. I put her in the time out stool (once I saw there were no flames) and raced to the stove.

GROSS. The water had evaporated, the rice was yellow/brown (it was originally white!), the parts that weren’t seared to the pan. The outside of the pan was black. Once I scraped the rice out, the bottom of the pan was black.

I looked around, and could still see the haze and smell the smell, the kitchen fan did nothing–so I had to open doors. It was 25 degrees outside, but it STANK. Thankfully, another fun task for M is to open/close doors, so she made a pretty good “human” fan.

I will be buying “boil in the bag” rice from now on.