frandroid

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.

That was some tough tofu. Mental note: do not fry tofu for as long as you fry seitan. However, replacing beer with wine in my carbonnade gave excellent results. I guess I should call it a vinonade?

Moi: So I just wanted to mention that while you used butternut squash here, I discovered a squash I didn't know, butterCUP squash, which looks a lot like an acorn squash. It kind of has the consistency of a potato, and tastes something between the butternut squash and a potato. I used it instead of potato in a Nepalese dish (Aloo, tama and bodi, which I adore). I think I like the original with potato better, but this combination is also very good and gives it a lighter flavour.

Michael: Where did you get the buttercup squash?

Moi: I got it at Kensington Fruit Market, across from Essence of Life, but I think it's widely available. When I say "discovered", I just mean in my own repertoire, Columbus-style.

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If you have good buttercup squash recipes, especially curries, please ssend them my way; there doesn't seem to be that many online. I discovered this vegetable by having it in a Thaï curry at the new Sukko Thai on Wellington (as tasty as on Parliament, but a few dollars more expensive, and with WAAAYYYY more tables) and I fell in love immediately.

PETA uses KKK imagery at dog show protest
Animal rights group says Kennel Club is trying to create 'master race'

WTF, PETA? I mean I have never cared for PETA's outreach methods, this comes awfully close to the boneheaded meat = holocaust argument.

I think we need to create PETAFA: People for Ethical Tactical Advertising in Favour of Animals as a counter-PETA organization.

I mean who's becoming veg over this? Is this helping their fundraising efforts? Not only I disapprove, but I don't even understand how this can be effective.

Via sabotabby: "Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along."

being called sir by strangers: back when English was a Foreign Language to me, Britain was a very Exotic country for me. When I moved to Vancouver, my first job was a night shift at Subway. For some reason, Brits love their dreadful weather so much that they actually visit Vancouver in droves in January, just to get more gloomy-weather punishment. They would go to bars, and after that, end up at my Subway to pick up something to eat. Some would call me sir, and that made me giddy as hell.

against bourgeois-feminism: I acquired a lot of my LJ-interests by browsing other people's and copying theirs, especially when people added me. It's quite interesting that LJ actually has a feature that allows you to copy other people's interests by just checkmarking them. Now it's been a while since I've had so much time on my hands :] Bourgeois feminism, I guess, would be oblivious to the intersection of feminism with class and race. Actually, I'm starting to dislike the term bourgeois a lot, I find it a very crude way to describe things, and feminism has to start somewhere anyway. I'm going to remove this interest.

ultrabrutalist modern architecture: That's the descriptor that Ninjalicious gave to Robarts Library, which lead me to discover that Brutalist architecture is indeed a specific style of architecture. His love for the library has made me appreciate this type of architecture a lot more. I am anxiously awaiting its $75 million expansion, although I hear they'll take down some of the existing concrete panels. Hopefully the expansion meshes well with the existing building.

failed subcultures: So many subcultures seem exciting at the beginning, and then peter out, or become so successful as to become coöpted, go mainstream and lose the essence of what made them relevant in the first place. Dominant subcultures in my life have been ANSI art, punk rock and the anti-globalization movement. Of these, only punk rock has survived (but has it?), whereas ANSI art (art archive), the digital character art of BBSes, died of its medium's irrelevance with the advent of the internet. The anti-globalization movement died on September 11, scared shitless. I guess the bourgeois activists went back "home" to a different kind of "patriotism"...

red star nutritional yeast: The best kind of nutritional yeast, it is yellower than its competitors and "gels" a lot more. hsifyppah gave me the book pictured to the right when she tired out of veganism, which I have enjoyed thoroughly. I have consumed RSNY in part because it provides vegans with the much-needed B12 vitamin, which is usually really hard to get without consuming dairy and meat. The lack of B12 can lead to permanent neurological damage, so it's not a minor thing to ignore. I have been told recently not to rely on RSNY alone for my B12 needs, and have thus started taking B12 supplements, until I talk to a nutritionist about this, which could be never. When I got for my next annual health check-up, I'll ask my doctor to send me for a B12 blood test.

responsible anarchists: a very rare animal. Its cousin species, the irresponsible anarchist, is a lot more common. Over time, I have come to assume that people become anarchists first and foremost because they have an unacknowledged desire not to take any responsibility for anything. The turn to anarchism usually happens during adolescence, when people first meet this necessity of taking responsibility. Eventually, as irresponsible anarchists mature, they stop being anarchists. They can then take three paths: go back to the mainstream or go bat-shit insane right-wing. What happens most often is that they become some sort of socialists with an anarchist sensibility, with a stronger resistance to state encroachment on individual rights. Not to be confused with a liberal.

jack layton's moustache: What's not to love? Some people believe that Jack and Olivia aren't a "real couple". I'm still on the fence, and maybe they are too.

Vegan Bodybuilding. It's not very well edited, but there are interesting articles and menus. While I'm amused to find this site, I'm not surprised as Québec's best competitive weightlifter in the mid-1990s was a vegan as well.