Finally! My first official "Can't" entry. This happened two weeks ago on a sunday evening. It sent me into a stress filled-freak out-tailspin and what was supposed to be a lovely diner and lazy sunday evening was quite the opposite.
Doesn't it look appetizing?
I burned the rice. I decided to not use the rice cooker and instead, for my batch of Cilantro Lime Rice from the Whole Foods Market Cookbook, i followed the recipe. Bad decision. I'm not sure when I last cooked rice in a pan. We have a rice cooker, which is a fantastic machine. I do not know why I thought my my two hands could do better or even as good as sophisticated Japanese fuzzy logic technology. Like I said, it was a bad decision.
Not only was the rice burned but it wasn't even fully cooked. Meanwhile I had heaps of chopped cilantro and spinach from the farmer's market waiting and I had to use it, so I salvaged what I could of the rice and mixed it all together. But not before a lot of yelling, mostly sharp obscenities, that were a cry for help which was not coming from the cook. The cook did talk me down a bit but only after we argued and got each other frustrated and I stormed around the kitchen.
The original menu for the evening was going to be the cilantro lime rice & some tofu cooked in the same manner as the previous post, only with pesto we had also bought at the farmers market. It is a cilantro pesto and has a vibrant garlic bite to it. It is made locally by Cal's Tofu and is amazing. So amazing that it made this horrid meal edible.
The cook was nice "It's not bad, Jess. Seriously, it's not." The tofu wasn't, and any bite with the pesto was good. But the rice was terrible. Even with pesto on it.
Recent events have given me a bit of perspective about what a bad decision really is. I made one on tuesday night that I don't want to go into right now. I'd like to keep it about cooking, a "can't" I can handle.
