fud.

I like making dinner. I like making NEW things for dinner. I think all people get into a cooking rut where they have a rotation of food they make all the time and it gets boring, like having Taco Thursday. Wait, forget I said that. Taco Thursday sounds like a great idea. But you know what I mean. You go to the grocery store every week or two and pick up the same crap you picked up before, and make the same stuff you made last week but this week you got some potstickers in a freezer bag or something so you feel excited.

Do you suffer from food boredom? If so, I have one word for you: roasted parsnips.

Don't ask questions.

Just do it.

Making new stuff is always an adventure where you have a bunch of pots and pans with a bunch of food doing a bunch of different stuff and you may or may not destroy it all. I find myself constantly saying, "Is this how this goes? I don't know wtf! MORE HERBS LOL." Like tonight I wanted to roast vegetables because I could live on roasted vegetables. (If little girl Jacky ever travels through time and meets grown up Jacky she'll think she grows up to be a host for a yeerk who is trying to get Visser 1 to give her her own cooking show. If you don't know what I'm talking about, be depressed.) I didn't have that many veggies, only 3 parsnips left from two nights ago, one orange bell pepper and one onion, so I chopped up a green apple and roasted that too. With balsamic vinaigrette. It was awesome.

And I made rice. Screw rice cookers, I did that shit on the stove in a pot like the cavemen did. The one thing I don't like about rice is that you're supposed to put a lid on it and not peek. I hate that. There are some stuff you're supposed to just leave the hell alone and let it do its thing. Whoever came up with the whole glass pot lid thing probably saved some lives. If you have high blood pressure and are NOT ALLOWED to look at your rice for 10 whole MINUTES, maybe you shouldn't make rice. I don't have high blood pressure but I am a control freak, and my pot lids are opaque. You know that Shroedinger's Cat theorem, where the cat is in a box and the chemical may or may have not degraded enough to kill the cat, so that cat might or might not be dead, and you don't know until you look? Zombie cat rice.

I've been thinking a lot about food budgets because I may have to stick to one in the near future. The whole Make Your Own versus Eating Out debate has been weighing heavily. Because you can go grocery shopping with the best of intentions and do so well for about 4 days, and then somebody invariably will say, "I feel like pizza tonight," and even if you didn't feel like pizza before you definitely feel like pizza now, and you just spent $80 on food 4 days ago, but what's another $20 on pizza when you'll have leftovers for tomorrow, and that's really not so much more, right? But you never have leftovers. And if you do, you eat them for breakfast the next morning. So you had the pizza last night and now you're looking at a refrigerator full of 2 day old stir fry and leftover spaghetti sauce which would have been good yesterday but you go the pizza, and they just don't look appetizing at all and you could literally walk to Chipotle, and the gas you'd save by walking certainly makes up for the money you'd be spending on more food you don't need to be buying, but it all evens out in the end and as long as you promise to do better next week there really isn't any harm, I mean your body needs food and there is some food right down the street, and all this grocery stuff will stay good for at least another week so you don't even have to go shopping again for a while. Well, you'll probably have to go get some more pastrami on Friday because you've been eating it for lunch all week and that saved you some money, which really, is just another reason why you should reward yourself tonight with a burrito.

I remember a conversation with my friend P when we were both in college. I had the great pleasure of living with my aunt for 2 whole years of college where I was fed and sheltered and warm and comfortable every single day, but P went to an art college that had bought out a few floors of an apartment complex in downtown DC, dropped the students into poorly kept rooms, and left them to fend for themselves in all regards. I called her around 9 at night, and this is how the conversation went:

P: I've hit bottom, dude.
J: what do you mean?
P: Can you guess what I'm eating right now?
J: Frosting.
P: I wish. There is literally nothing to eat in this kitchen. Nothing. I think there is ketchup in the refrigerator. I am eating rice...out of a pan...uncooked.
J: no.
P: yes.
J: You don't even like rice.
P: I know.
J: It's a texture thing.
P: I know.
J: why is it uncooked?
P: I don't know, dude. I don't know.
J: Cook it!
P: I don't know how! I DON'T LIKE RICE SO I NEVER LEARNED TO COOK IT!
J: look on the bag!
P: The bag is gone! It's in a ziploc!
J: Look on the internet!
P: It's down! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!

And so was mine. We were, through some awful twist of rice-hostile fate, both internetless.

And I realized I, also, did not know how to cook rice.

But really, if you can cook rice, you will always have food. If all you have to your name is a dollar in quarters you harvested from upturned couch cushions, you can go buy some rice and cook it and you will be sustained for another day, or at least long enough to figure out what the hell you're going to do about having nothing but couch money.

POVERTY RICE:

It's a one-to-two ratio. One cup rice, two cups water. Two cups rice, four cups water. A little less than 1:2 ratio makes fluffier rice. So maybe you like a 1:1 and 1/2. Or 1:1 and 3/4.

Put in the water.
Put in the rice.
Bring to a boil.
Turn down to a simmer.
Put a lid on and simmer for 10 minutes.
= rice.

You can make not-so-poverty rice by using chicken or vegetable stock. I like to toast the rice before I boil it because it makes it nuttier. put 2 tablespoons of butter in the pot and melt it up, put in the rice and stir around without any liquid. Keep it moving. When you can smell the warm rice smell, it's toasted. Pour in the liquid, continue as poverty rice.
=rice.

There you are, my friends. Never starve again.