Adventures in Cooking: How Not To Make Minute Rice

In my house now, we have a rotation of who cooks dinner. My parents cook two nights, my sister and her boyfriend cook two nights, and I cook two nights, with the guidance of my mom. On Friday, everyone fends for themselves. It's a pretty good system.

Since I have Mom helping me, I am slowly learning how to cook things more complicated than Mac and Cheese (which tastes perfectly fine when made with lactose-free milk) and hot dogs. I was going to add spaghetti to this list, but I kind of set a noodle on fire when I made spaghetti two weeks ago.

Last week, I was making Orange Chicken from a recipe on the Food Network website. Everything was going fine, it was cooking away happily in the oven, when my sister comes home. She asks what we're having and I tell her, rather proudly, "Orange Chicken"

Basically this, but with some alterations to make it orange instead of lemon

"And what with it?" she asks. And at this question my mind stops comprehending English for a minute. What with it? What goes with chicken? What does she mean?

"Um...broccoli?" I say, drawing out the word. "Aaaand?" she asks again. This is becoming a maddening question. Mom realizes what she's asking and takes pity on me. "Oh, a starch." Right. Duh, we need rice. But rice takes forty minutes and the chicken will be done in ten. "Uh, I think we have some Minute Rice in the cupboard," Mom says.

Mwhahaha, don't I look simple? I'm gonna make you wish you used the rice cooker.

Sure enough, there's a box of Minute Rice. I pull it out and look at the side to figure out how to make it and the number of portions to make. Mom leaves me on my own to do this, mostly likely figuring, incorrectly I might add, "How can she screw this up? It's Minute Rice."

I get the water boiling, add the correct number of cups of rice, and then place a plate on top since we can't find the lid to cover it. I leave it alone to the required time. After the buzzer dings I lift the plate off and hot, water steam drips onto my leg. Probably an omen of bad things to come.

I throw the plate in the sink and look in the pot...and then call Mom over. "Something went wrong with the rice." For, instead of fluffy, perfectly cooked Minute Rice, there was instead a vat of rice that was a little...soggy. There may have even been extra liquid in the pan still.

I'm going to taunt you for the rest of your life.

Mom stares, perplexed at the rice for a moment. Then she turns to me and asks, "How much water did you use?" I look at her confused. How much water? Does it make a difference? I shurg and make the vocal equivalent of "I have no freakin' clue".

Apparently, rice is not like pasta. You can't just throw any amount of water you want in with the rice. Rice is the baking equivalent of the starch world; everything must be precise. Since I didn't measure the water, now I have really wet rice.

Which Mom valiantly tries to salvage. We put the rice in the microwave, covered, for 2 minutes. Then, we try putting it back in the microwave for another two minutes without a cover. Mom explains as the microwave whirs that the reason it doesn't matter how much water you put in with pasta is because you drain it. So, when she takes the rice out and it still looks watery, I ask, "Why don't we drain the rice?"

"I'm so mocking you right now"

So we did. Yes, I can actually say that I have drained rice in a colander. This seemed to get rid of most of the excess water. And the rice wasn't completely inedible either. But when Mom said she wasn't going to keep the leftover rice, I was the first to agree. I bet that would have been the moistest rice ever when reheated the next day though. ;)

Adventures in Cooking: The Saddest Little Pirate Ship That Ever Did Sail

A couple of months ago, during the middle of the Spring quarter at Western, Team Starkid was having a contest to advertise their newest show: Starship. To enter you just had to make a profile picture that was in some way Starship related. My friend Becky and I decided that we should make a cake. A pirate ship cake. With stars on it. (Get it? Star Ship?)

To make sure we could actually do this, we searched the internet and actually found directions on making a pirate ship cake (which of course looked epic, as all bakery examples from housemoms with far too much time on their hands tend to do). And we were like, "We can totally do this!" Oh internet, why must you lie so cruelly?

We went out and bought a funfetti cake mix, along with funfetti frosting (because that is the best frosting of all (or it was until they took the candy bits out of the frosting itself)) along with the basic boxed cake mix ingredients like oil and eggs. But alas, after getting it all back we didn't get time to make it and missed the deadline.

Fast forward to dead week of Spring and Becky messages me, reminding me that we still have the cake mix. So we set a day and thus the cake adventure begins. There were signs right away that this would not turn out as smoothly as it should. The first was that we didn't actually have a bowl large enough to mix up the entire box mix.

Okay, no sweat. We split the mix into two bowls and split the ingredients between the two (doing this with the three eggs was very interesting). At first, one was very watery and the other was kind of dry and yellow (it was a white cake mix). But, here the universal rule of sauces appeared: if you let it stand a little, it will thicken up. It finally actually started looking like cake mix and we managed to mix it all together and pour it in the pan (which we did grease).

Now, Becky's oven actually is bitter about its lot in life and hates the people who use it. She told me that once her roommate was making chicken and she'd been waiting nearly an hour for it to cook and it still looked fairly raw. She left it, came back five minutes later and it was burned. Like I said, it hates people.

So we put it in for twenty minutes and went to check it. The top looked kind of golden, so we pulled the pan towards us to check it...and it jiggled. Like it was semi-solid Jello. Yeah, that didn't look right. So we put it back in and decided to check it again in ten minutes. At which point the middle still jiggled. Not good. We put it back in. We pulled it out and put it back three more times before it was finally cooked.

And then we faced a new dilemma: getting it out of the pan. Because it was greased, it should have fallen out gracefully with just a little edge work. We tried to flip it onto a plate. No dice. We shimmied a knife around the edge again and tried again...nada. One more time, we cut around the edge, this time sliding the knife slightly under the cake as well.

Third time's a charm. Sort of. This is what happened:

Half the cake exited correctly. The other half was still stuck in the pan. *facepalm* But it was okay, since we had decided to cut the cake in half to have a base anyway. So ha ha Cake, the joke's on you! (Yes, I am mocking the cake that has already been consumed. This way it can't torture me any further).

We started off frosting the cake with a knife. And right off a couple of issues arose. A) Our cake was still kind of warm because we were impatient ferrets who needed to make it now, and B) we had cut off some of the golden part to give us a flat surface for our deck, which unfortunately meant that c) pieces of cake flaked off. But, we just turned those pieces into our ocean. Yes, we were insanely determined not to let the cake beat us.

At this point we just decided to give up using the knife and instead frost it with our fingers. Well, Becky was frosting it mostly, since I am more of a supervisor than craftsman. Also, I figured that I really wouldn't be doing a better job, although I did try to frost a little bit. And I got the same result of cake collecting on my fingers instead of frosting collecting on the cake.

Oh well, we still managed to get the cake frosted and set a little deck up. We even broke up some tiny Popsicle sticks to make it look more deck-like. Sadly, we didn't have any of the blue frosting you can get that comes out like spray cheese, or we would have used that to color our ocean.

Then it came time to build the mast. Instead of cutting one long piece of cake and reinforcing that one piece so it stood up, we decided to cut up a bunch of little pieces and build it cake brick by cake brick. Yes, we are insane. Even more so when you consider that we had to frost each of these cake bricks to get them to stick together.

There is a very good reason that Becky looks perplexed here. Frosting the little buggers was even more tiresome and difficult than doing the cake. It was like tiny cake imps were shoving the frosting off as we tried to put it on the square. Try to roll it on and it would just stick to your finger. Dabbing, I swear more of the frosting came off, even if none was on it.

I even pitched in to try a couple of bricks. As you can see, more of it ended up on my hands than probably ended up on the cake itself. We probably sat there for a good twenty minutes trying to get these little pieces frosted so they could stand up as our mast. We may not be cake masters, but we were determined, dang it.

In the end, we did manage to get the mast up, but as you can see, it was heavily leaning on side supports and popsicle sticks in the middle. We weren't even entirely sure it would stay up through the finishing touches and travel time to the Glee Mary Kay Party (which is where it was destined for since we couldn't eat an entire cake ourselves). But we gave it the benefit of the doubt.

Okay, so we still had a lot of doubt. We decided to just stick one of the star sticky notes on the cake's mast and call it good. We stuck it on and then frantically took pictures, willing it not to fall down in the process. As you may be able to tell, it was still quite precarious and probably one of the saddest pirate ship cakes to ever be made.

But we were very freakin' proud out it. It was messed up from the beginning, failed to cooperate, looked nothing like the picture, and we still had about a half a can of frosting and a third to a quarter of the cake that we didn't use. But dang it, we made a pirate ship cake. We made a Starship. And despite it's woebegone appearance, it was absolutely delicious.

So that is the tale of the saddest little pirate ship cake in the world. And hopefully the first of adventures in cooking segments to come. Because I keep trying to tell people I can't cook, but I have to learn because otherwise I will live off of toast and sandwiches which, delicious as they are, get a little tedious after a while. So, on to the next adventure!