TracyFood

Odds and ends: rice, snobbery, and procrastination. 6 February 2008 11:57 am

Posted by Tracy in : anthropology, cooking, food snobbery, friends, pictures, politics, recipes, school, soup , trackback

Intrigued by a comment from Liz on my curried pea soup recipe, I made a version with 2 cups of brown rice instead of potatoes last Saturday. Results: as Liz also mentioned in her comment, I had to cook it for a lot longer to get the rice done (for once the peas weren’t the slow part of the cooking process) and then it turned my blending equipment was no match for the task of getting the soup all nice and smooth. Dangit! The soup is still tasty, don’t get me wrong, but as far as I’m concerned the texture leaves something to be desired. Something smooth and creamy, like blended potatoes. Gah. I’m such a snob sometimes.

But speaking of rice, if you haven’t seen Free Rice already, it’s a fun game for a good cause, and an excellent procrastination tool (sort of like updating a food blog when I’m supposed to be finishing today’s assigned readings for my anthropology class, but I digress.) My average score is in the mid to upper 40s, with last night’s high at 50 and lows around 43 and 44 and dropping after I’d played for so long that I was tired and the questions were starting to repeat, only when I messed up I’d get new questions and discover my brain was too fried to break out the old “yeah, I used to tutor SAT verbal” tricks. But still: yay fun games and yay rice!

Speaking of snobbery, I watched something like seven hours of sports on TV on Sunday in an effort to take notes on food advertising for my anthropology class. Preliminary conclusion: the food landscape advertised to TV-watching sports fans is a nutritional desert interspersed with occasional crappy beer. I haven’t come up with any particularly interesting, let alone surprising, observations about gender in the ads, except that the Superbowl ads were a little less blatantly he-man than the ones during the hockey game (match?): New York Rangers vs. Montréal Canadiens. And both the Superbowl and the hockey were much more fun to watch than I’d expected.

Back to rice: I finally figured out congee a few weeks ago! Behold:

I was experimenting with soaking rice before cooking it (partly under the influence of Madhur Jaffrey but also in response to Harold McGee’s New York times article about the use of heat) and I’m not sure what happened, whether I soaked the rice for too long or used more water than was necessary after soaking, but hoo lady did I ever end up with a cooker full of weird gelatinous goo. Only then I realized what I actually had was more or less like polenta, except made with rice, and then I understood congee, which probably deserves a whole little essay of its own (note to self: get on that, but do your reading first).

Finally, and speaking of rice, snobbery, and a good way to lose a few minutes that might be more responsibly spent: Food Fight is a stop-motion animated film that’s sort of brilliant but also I think unmistakably awful? Don’t click the link unless (SPOILER ALERT) you’re up for a short film reenacting the past few decades of U.S. military involvements through the medium of foods stereotypically representative of the various nations involved. (END SPOILER ALERT) First I was bored, then I was a little grossed out, then I was a lot grossed out, but all told I’m still thinking about it now, so there’s something there, even if I’m not sure exactly what.

And that’s all I’ve got for today. Now I’m really going back to my reading, really.