Cooking rice

As you can see, we have two electric rice cookers, but I've been using the pressure cooker since about our third day here and will probably continue to use it. It took me a few tries to get the proportions right, partly because we're using brown rice but washing it because it's from Yoshie's parents' supply (last year's rice, of course) and a few moths fluttered out when I first opened the bag. I've settled on two measuring cups of rice and three measuring cups of water plus 50cc after washing and draining the rice in a colinder. When the pressure top starts singing, I turn the heat down all the way, let it cook 35 minutes, then turn off the heat and let it sit on the stove until the pressure relief valve goes off.

According to the fascinating website What Japan Thinks, a recent survey showed that only 2% of Japanese households lack a rice cooker. Of course, as I said, we don't lack for rice cookers. It's just that I think the pressure cooker makes more sense nutritionally and also in turms of energy conservation. If I start working full-time one of these days, we'll probably start using one of the rice cookers since they can be programmed to have the rice newly-cooked and warm when you come home from the supermarket with the rest of dinner from the o-sozai department.

Also, Yoshie likes to bake cakes in them, though she hasn't been doing much baking since she started working full-time. (By the way, full-time in Japan typically means 50 - 60 hours a week and her job in definitely typical.)

We eat brown rice. In fact, at the moment, we don't have any white rice in the house, though that will soon change since we all prefer some dishes with mixed white and brown rice. I've spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to find out when white rice became the main form, but so far I haven't gotten any relevant information at all. Just as there's strong prejudice towards white bread in most of the world, white rice is generally considered by many people to be more pure, even more wholesome. When the oldest person in the world died a week or so ago, there were lots of articles in the Japanese press about how many centenarians there are in Japan. (Over 36,000 according to Wikipedia.) One article I read said this was generally attributed to the Japanese diet which, the writer said, was high in fish and white rice. One of the true characteristics of centenarians, cited in the Wikipedia article, is the fact the women who never marry were particularly likely to join the club.