The Simple Art of Cooking Rice

A group effort was needed to chop all the ingredients for Thai Curry Paste

My friend, Sue, and I were very lucky recipients of The Cook School gift vouchers for Christmas gifts!  (I shamelessly campaigned for Santa to put a voucher in my stocking because I knew Sue was getting one and I wanted us to go together!)  Believe it or not, this is not the last of my Christmas gifts!  In November, I am very much looking forward to seeing Kevin Bridges at the Hydro with my family!

I had been intrigued by the Knife Skills course, but we
managed to get a bit of knife skills during this class!

It took Sue and I quite a while to find a day that suited our schedule!  But, last week, we had the pleasure of spending a day learning Thai Street Food!  During this day, the 10 students learned how to make a Thai Curry Paste, Roast Prawn and watermelon salad with green chilli and roasted peanuts, Sang Wa and Caramel Pineapple with chilli and mint. We had so much fun with this that we have scheduled our own personal day to try to duplicate what we learned.....I expect you will read more about that in a few weeks!

I had not intended to post anything about this day until we had experimented and seen if our results were worthy of discussion!  However, the attention my Facebook post got about the simple way our chef told us to cook rice said to me that I should post this so I can refer to it again myself!

With all 10 people scurrying around chopping, stirring and basically just thinking about all the things going on in our own stations, it was up the chef to make the rice!  So this is what he told us:


Put the rice in a pan, he did no more than 10 servings at a time. 10 Servings seems way more than I would have been comfortable with anyway.  Last night, I only made 2 servings.

Use your pinky to gauge the depth of the water over the rice. As in, lay your finger down and the depth of water should just be the depth of your finger. Of course, almost your whole hand gets wet but who cares! 

Put a lid on, bring to boil and then turn off the heat and time for 7 minutes. And it worked. This was just rice, not Uncle Ben's or anything. I never expected rice to cook that quickly but it did!

The only complaint my husband had was he prefers rice that is not sticky.  This method is stickier than the way I usually make it, but so much easier......I wonder how long it will take him to get used to it!!    ;-)

If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it's not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others - it's the same with music.    will.i.am