unpolished rice

Before I get on with this rice tale, I'll mention that I'm sipping on a kind of tequila martini, and if you told me 2-3 years ago that this would become my drink, me the drinker of manhattans and dedicated whisky drinker, I would have been quite puzzled. Though at that point I had already learned that my taste is a moving target so I wouldn't have been surprised per se.

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So I've been going up to the Kurdish Community Center a bit more in recent months. The KCC resides in a suburban strip mall, quite close to York University. Thankfully it is super close to a subway station so on the line I live by so it's an easy commute for me.

So the last first times I've been going, where I get to my destination from the back of the strip mall, I pass by some African grocery store. Now I've been to African grocery stores before, and they don't come close to South Asian grocery stores in terms of selection and wonders, but I like to give everyone a chance and hope to find something new and different. So a few weeks ago I went to the KCC, and I was a little early, so I decided to drop by this store. I tried to enter but the door was locked. I knocked and motioned to the person at the cash, who came and asked me what I wanted, suspicious. I said that I wanted to see what food they were selling. Surprised, she let me in. Then she quickly asked me what I was looking for, but I told her that I justed wanted to browse.

Frankly I must say that this was not a great store, as its utter lack of customers was indicating. The selection was not great but I decided to peruse anyway. As usual in such stores, there were different sizes of large containers of bright orange and congealed palm oil for sale, which are quite impressive. There were some types of beans that I hadn't seen before, which I might have tried, but my bean shelves (2 of them) are overloaded right now so I decided to skip. Nothing was particular extraordinary anyway. I picked up a can of double-concentrated Italian tomato paste. Looking forward to try that one. Eventually I came to the rice. There was some rice I had never tried before, and wouldn't you know it, we were in need of rice, so I decided that this would be my Big Purchase in this store. CAD$15 for a 6 pound bag of rice, above the going rate for our usual Basmati.

So I get to the till with this bag of rice, and the lady asks me: "So you want this?" looking at me askance again. I say yes, I would love to try a new kind of rice. She says "This is our national rice in Nigeria". "Great!" I paid for my goods and got on my way.

So when I got home later on I decided to see how to cook this rice, which is named Ofada rice. Instructions I've found direct to a much more strenuous cleaning routine than I'm used to for other rice, but I've seen some people clean rice really hard, so I don't discount these instructions. Many rinses later, my rice is as close to clean as I can make it. This rice is cooked in two steps. The first step is to boil it, by cooking with lots of water for 10 minutes. Then you drain that water, wash the rice again, and then put a smaller quantity of water to steam the rice, Indian style.

At that point F came into the kitchen, asked me what I was doing, and I told her about this rice. I mentioned in passing that it was described as "unpolished" rice, which was a descriptor I was not familiar with. F, however, was familiar with it, as judged by her "oh no" reaction. I did notice that the rice had a bit of pungency while cooking, but the pot was covered for the steaming process.

Eventually, the cooking time was reached, I let the rice stand for another 5 minutes, and I uncovered the pot.

Reader, what I just described above as "pungent" was not preparing me for the smell. I think "horse stable on a rainy day" would be a close description. F entered the kitchen again, took one sniff, went "URK" and vowed not to eat this rice. Then she told me about this uncle of hers that had gotten unpolished rice once, and it was disgusting, but he was eating it like it was the best thing ever, much to her dismay.

So I decided to be encouraged by this uncle. I tasted a few grains and they weren't bad, so I decided that this was actually edible. I put a serving of rice on my plate, put whatever leftover food we were eating that night over it (some sort of average chana I think?), warmed that up in the microwave, and eventually sat down to eat.

Now the trick was to not smell too much the steam coming out of the rice, so covering the rice with food to seal in its water vapor helped a lot. I ended up eating this rice with no problem. It's no basmati, but it's a decent rice, with stubby, chewy grains. Since then I've had leftovers from that first batch a few times, since I made two cups of rice right away and F was determined not to touch it. Lots of leftovers.

So I'm not going to buy this or any other unpolished rice ever again, but I'm going to go through this bag. I've now figured out that I need to over-reheat this rice so that there isn't too much steam coming out of it by the time it gets to the table. But man, there's a lot of rice, and I'm going to have to eat it all by myself. Sigh. I'm going to try to slip in a southern soul food dish where the rice is blended with the rest of the dish and maybe F can eat it, but, whew. We'll see.

Podcast Friday - Podcasts for Palestine - A Modest Proposal

So I was listening to this episode of the Intercepted podcast, hosted by Jeremy Scahill, with Mouin Rabbani as the guest, from back in December. I have a backlog of conflict podcasts I'm trying to catch up to...

I didn't know of Rabbani before this current invasion of Gaza--somehow he lives here in Toronto and he's a co-editor of Jadaliyya, the pre-eminent radical Middle Eastern politics online magazine. But I've come to look forward to his contributions.

This is extremely unfair to him, but his name amuses me. "Mouin" is Québec French for "meh", and Rabbani just brings back Rabban (nephew of Baron Harkonen of Dune infany) to my feeble mind. He is rather stocky and round, not unlike how the character has been depicted. But enough silliness. Mouin has a very level and droll delivery, while he talks about the conflict in very clear terms that illuminate and break through any and all issues, sometimes with a fairly dry sense of humour.

So I'm listening to this podcast episode, and you can find the whole recording and transcript here, but the final chapter of this interview really hit like a freight truck:

"And a world in which Washington or Brussels challenge Israel and take measures to compel Israel to end its occupation, that doesn’t exist, any more than the moon is made out of cheese.

So, my view, and I’m perhaps in a minority here, is that, at least as a theoretical matter, a two-state settlement is entirely achievable, because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a point of no return.

If you compare the West Bank to Algeria, Algeria was internationally recognized as an integral part of the French homeland until 1954 by the entire international community as it existed then. That’s never been the case for Israel and the West Bank. And all it would take is a phone call from Washington and the occupation would end. Again, that’s never going to happen, but you can think of ways in which Western interests in the Middle East are sufficiently challenged, that the U.S. and Europe may begin to change their policies.

So, the issue is not whether there can be a two-state settlement. I think one question we need to ask ourselves in view of what we’ve seen in the past month is whether there should be peace with Israel. And here’s what I mean by that.

If you look at Europe in the 1940s, at a certain point, a conclusion was reached that there could be no peace in Europe without the dismantling of the Nazi regime, because it was a rabid, lunatic, irrational state with whom peace was simply impossible. No one talked about exterminating or expelling the German people, but about dismantling the state and its key institutions.

You go to Southeast Asia in the late 1970s, and a conclusion was reached that, in addition to the expulsion of American forces, peace in Southeast Asia could not be attained without dismantling the rabid, lunatic, thoroughly irrational Khmer Rouge regime. You go to Southern Africa in the 1990s and, similarly, it became apparent that, unless you dismantle the white minority regime in South Africa, peace in Southern Africa would remain a pipe dream.

Now, you look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism. And, in the last week or two alone, Israel has accused the leaders of Spain, Belgium, and Ireland of supporting terrorism for having even the slightest disagreement with it.

You have Israel’s clownish representative to the United Nations, who attends security council meetings wearing a concentration camp outfit, or at least the yellow star, and demanding the immediate resignation of the U.N. Secretary General, whose position … He hasn’t named Israel once as responsible for anything. But he demanded his immediate resignation simply because he made the obvious factual observation that the attacks of October 7th were not the beginning of the history of this conflict, and is demanding resignations left and right.

For Israel, slaughtering 15,000 people in a month, conducting the most intensive bombing in the history of the Middle East — and we’re talking about the Middle East, not Scandinavia — has become perfectly normal. It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition. I would argue that the Israeli regime is a clear and present danger to peace in the Middle East, and, rather than drawing any conclusions, rather than or in addition to having a discussion and debate about how Israeli-Palestinian peace might be achieved, we should also be asking ourselves, should that peace be achieved? Or, rather, can it only be achieved by dismantling a regime and its key institutions the way that was done in Europe in the 1940s, in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, in South Africa in the 1990s, Southern Africa in the 1990s, and I’m sure there are other examples as well.

And, just to be clear, I’m not talking about expulsion of Israeli citizens or whatnot. I’m talking about a regime and its institutions. Again, let’s not jump to conclusions, but let’s ask the difficult questions."

A modest proposal.