Fourth Batch: Practice. We've been fortunate to have Tia Isabel joining us once a week to cook traditional Ecuadorian meals, and the cooking lessons have been great. So we used our time with her to learn the right way to cook rice, and with her help, we practiced a batch, which turned out to be not-so-bad.
Fifth Batch: Success!! Thanks to the detailed notes we took while Tia Isabel was giving us rice-cooking lessons, we were able to follow the recipe on our own, and voila... good rice! It wasn't perfect, but the flavor was good, the consistency was light and fluffy, and it was definitely not something we'd be embarrassed to serve our Ecuadorian friends.
Who knew that cooking rice would involve an hour of washing, rinsing, boiling, adding 4 (!) tablespoons of salt, straining, adding olive oil (2 times), re-cooking, steaming, and most surprisingly, covering with a wet plastic bag!
...I think we may stick with Minute Rice when we get home. :)
Its really not like that at home! I promise! This makes me worry that I wont be able to cook in Ecuador! (the council is meeting TODAY! a little birdie told us our little ones case was on the docket! I pray this is true!)
ReplyDelete