Problems With Rice

Rice is a tricky thing.  It's so small, and seemingly innocuous. 

But a little goes such a long way.  Take 1/4 cup of dry rice, cook it, and you end up with 3/4 of a cup, cooked.

Yesterday, I had lunch with a group of friends.  We got to talking about the disasters we've had with rice over the years.  You know... those mistakes you only make once.

I thought my own experience of cooking 6 cups of dry rice (18 cups cooked) took the cake, but I was wrong.

Susan's husband had to make rice for a work event. Someone had given him a recipe, and told him to double it.  Now, the recipe called for 2 pounds of rice.  (It must have been an old recipe, because it's not often that you see recipes written in pounds anymore.)  So, he took four - yes 4- 1 pound bags of rice, added water, and put it on the stove.  Within 10 minutes, the rice had expanded enough to have pushed the lid off of the pan, and rice was beginning to pour down the sides of the pan.  Unfortunately, he had decided to take a shower while the rice was cooking.  By the time he heard the smoke detector over the noise of the running water, and run downstairs, he found that the rice had run down the side of the pan, onto the heating element and was smoldering away.  Total time from the minute he put the lid on to simmer the rice until the time he found the disaster downstairs?  12 minutes.  (There was still 8 minutes left on the timer.)

When Carol got married 50 years ago, people we still throwing rice at weddings.  She wore a strapless dress, and one of those long, waist length strapless bras.  It was a very hot and humid day.  They left the church to go to the reception, and people threw rice.  By the time she got home and took everything off that night, the rice had COOKED inside of her dress!

And lastly, Sharon.  Her husband decided to clean out the kitchen cupboards.  He found 10 boxes of Rice A Roni that were past their expiration date and decided that he was going to run them down the garbage disposal.  Not throw them out, mind you, run them down the garbage disposal.  With hot water.  I think you might already see where this is going.  By the time he got to the tenth box, Sharon could hear him flipping the disposal on and off and on and off.  "What's going on?"  she asked.

"The disposal seems to be jammed.  Could you bring me a plunger?"

Well, no amount of plunging was going to clean 10 boxes of rice a roni out of the kitchen pipes.  It had gone down the drain, and it had expanded, and it had completely blocked the drain.

The next morning the plumber came out with his roto-rooter to clean out the pipe.

As he rotored, the rice began flying back up out of the pipe and all over the kitchen - the walls, the cabinets, and the curtains.

Rice can be a heartless bitch.