Is It Something In The Water?

Last night as I was making some rice to have with dinner it occurred to me, as it frequently does, that these Swiss are crazy. They recommended cooking time for rice here seems to be 45-60 minutes for brown (which is what we were eating last night) and about half that for white rice*. Really? It's been a while since I cooked rice in what I like to annoy Reto by referring to as The Sensible Continent (=Australia, obviously. And then we have an argument about whether it actually is a continent or not, which Reto obviously always loses because he is wrong and foolish), but I'm sure brown rice cooks there in something like 25 minutes, and white rice in about half that time. And my (many many many) rice-cooking experiments in this country lead me to think that Australian estimates are far closer to the truth than Swiss ones.

Which reminds me of a conversation that I eavesdropped on some time ago, where my mother-in-law and brother-in-law were discussing corn on the cob, and whether we were, at the time, eating the fresh variety or the pre-cooked variety. There was some confusion for a while, and eventually my mother-in-law said "no, it's the fresh stuff; I boiled it for half an hour". I assumed she was joking and sort of laughed a bit, and then when I told them that I was under the impression that corn on the cob needs to be boiled for about 5 minutes it became clear that everyone thinks I have no idea about anything, can't cook and am probably feeding my family on nothing but hay and raw potatoes.

So what's going on? Why do we apparently need to cook everything forever in this wacky country? And why is the corn on the cob still so gristly and tough even after it's been tormented for all that time?






* I mean normal uncooked rice, not that horrible parboiled stuff which looks, tastes and smells weird and also doesn't really seem to even take much less time to cook anyway. I did read somewhere once that parboiled rice retains more of its nutritional value, but that doesn't convince me that it's worth eating.

Corn Shock

In another long and arduous day at the Sydney Film Festival, today I became outraged about corn. I watched a doco called King Corn (so unheard of it doesn't seem to even have a spot on imdb) and I wasn't really planning to enjoy it that much, but I did and now I am revelling in my outrage. Americans eat so much corn that they are practically made of it. They kill cows with it. No doubt they destroy biodiversity and therefore entire ecosystems by growing so much of it. They poison themselves by eating it relentlessly. It's all fertiliser/pesticide laden and genetically modified. It's economically and nutritionally unsustainable.

Now I want to see the same thing but about soy. I'm sure I could get angry about that, too.