The Wonders of Rice

Rice. We see it everywhere. Not only in Asian restaurants but also many European restaurants as well, though it may be a different kind of rice. You can find them brought out to you in a bowl in any Chinese restaurant, completed with different dishes such as fish and orange chicken, or you can find them in French restaurants tossed in butter and other ingredients such as beef and pepper. You can also find rice in Mexican restaurants, like Chipotle for example, wrapped in a burrito or you can just order the burrito bowl. The Japanese make "onigiri", or rice ball, that is formed into a triangular or oval shape and often wrapped in seaweed. They also make sushi out of them.

There are so many ways we can cook rice, and I realized that because mom cooked porridge the other night for breakfast. We also add other ingredients and spices into the rice to make it more flavorful and not just bland. And not only do rice show up in course meals, it can be made into desserts as well. The Japanese have rice cakes, stuffed with red beans and sprinkled with coconut flakes, and they come in different colors. They also have rice crackers, wrapped in seaweed. There is also rice pudding. The list goes on and on. However, I saw on a few television ads and books saying that rice may not be good for one's health. They say that a bowl of rice is equivalent to one cup of pure white sugar. Nevertheless, people still love to eat them, in any cooked style and form of it. Yet there are also others who are unwilling to give up their love for eating rice, so instead of consuming the tiny and thin white grains they eat Akai Rice that comes in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes.

Personally I love to eat rice because I can never just eat an entire steak for dinner, or constantly eating noodles or soup noodles day after day, or hamburgers and western food. Perhaps eating rice for every meal is a tradition, passed down from parents and grandparents and you start off eating them when you were little. At home we eat rice all the time, and three plates of course meal would feel incomplete without it. And if we only eat rice without anything else, it would feel bland. For burritos rice is tossed together with beans, ground meat, and cheese. And for sushi it is wrapped with vegetables, pickled radish, and small cut slices of fish. I think many of us don't realize how much rice we eat. But perhaps when we eat sushi and order takeout and notice suddenly that there is no rice to be seen, that will be when we notice.