Learning to Make Rice

In the kitchen with my mother one fall afternoon, I tentatively expressed an interest in learning to cook. She laughed out as if I'd suggested I might learn to fly and said no. You're too young, you'd just get in my way and I don't have time. Ask your grandmother. The subject was not raised again and I found myself with no call to learn. I had no aspirations to be Julia Child and there were simple cookbooks to be had. I made do.

Some years later, the vet suggested that adding cooked rice to our elderly cat's diet would help her intestinal problems and wiling to do anything to make her last years a little easier, I immediately bought a glass sauce pan,

a bag of Uncle Ben's and dusted off my basic Betty Crocker. In the box with the sauce pan was a metal triangle and a warning never to use the sauce pan without it. Curious, I thought, but I dimly remembered an experiment from 7th grade science about heat, water, glass and conductivity - I wasn't positive but it seemed that putting a metal spoon into a glass container of hot liquid would keep the glass from shattering. It seemed sensible to me so I filled the sauce pan with the specified amount of water, dropped the metal triangle in, measured out rice and added it to the boiling water. I did this once a day for several weeks and Tiffany's intestinal problems improved. I was worried about wear and tear on the triangle though - it was prone to rust - and I made a note to purchase another one.

One afternoon in my friend Tricia's kitchen, I noticed that on each burner on her stove there was a metal triangle.

None were rusted. A glass pot of rice was cooking, resting on it's own triangle and in what I can only describe as a moment of sudden and blinding domestic insight, I realized how the triangle was meant to be used. My hand flew to my mouth in horror, Oh my God! I shrieked, I've been poisoning Tiffany! Dear friend that she is, Tricia calmly coaxed an explantion from me then did her level best not to laugh but she was overcome and in seconds was laughing so hard she could barely stand and tears were running down her cheeks. The more I tried to explain, the worse it got.

The rusted rice diet was not fatal - Tiffany survived several more years and did quite well. I learned a valuable lesson about cooking and friendship - Tricia still tells this story with love each and every time - and I suspect that we all have some version of learning to make rice in out pasts. We do learn best by our mistakes.