IOCAW V1C12

Chapter 12: Rice with egg on top is the best.

After some 20, 30 minutes of stabbing it, I successfully polished the rice. I removed the rice husks and rice bran from the polished rice. I asked Basil to use her windpower to blow away the bits of rice husks I couldn’t pick out, then I washed the white rice and cooked it in a ceramic pot. There were no measuring cups in this world, so I used a teacup instead. The rice to water ratio of our family, straight from my mother, was one to a little more than one cup. After covering the pot, I cooked at medium heat for five minutes. The pot lid began to dance from all the bubbles popping out of the boiling water, and I switched to low heat for ten minutes.

I’m going on a tangent, but there are six burners in the Claude kitchen. There are two burners for each heat power, low, medium, and high. You cannot adjust the heat of a burner, so you have to move the whole pot between burners. I’ll have to talk to Alex about this next time, it needs to be improved.

Using a five-minute hourglass to keep time, I waited for the rice to cook. After ten minutes of low heat, I moved the pot to high heat and counted ten seconds. Then I turned off the fire, but I kept the pot lid on. The rice still had to steam, but it was sitting right in front of me. There was still some time before mealtime, so I decided to try some in secret.

What should I use as the side for rice? I looked in the fridge and the freezer, but nothing stood out to me. Honestly, the fact that I couldn’t make any Japanese sides because we didn’t have soy sauce and miso was very painful to me. While I closed the door of the fridge, my eyes landed on a basket on a shelf next to it. Oh! I have eggs! It must be a sign for me to make rice with egg on top!

I took an egg from the basket and took out a deep-ish bowl to substitute for a rice bowl, and a spoon to substitute for chopsticks. No soy sauce, so I took out some salt. Of course, there was no rice paddle, so I brought out a wooden spatula. Just in time.

“Master, is it ready yet?”

“Yeah, I’ll open it now, okay?”

“Okay!”

At Basil’s urging, I nervously opened the lid. The room filled with the fragrance of just cooked rice.

It’s rice!!

I peeked in the pot to see the glistening, fat white grains of rice and heard a “whoa” in Basil’s voice next to me.

“…what a good smell.”

“It really is, wow!”

Even though it had not been that long since I had come to this world, I felt some sort of nostalgia from the smell of the rice. I gently inserted the wooden spatula into the rice and slowly mixed the rice by flipping the insides of the pot out on top. Some tasty-looking scorched rice was flipped up in the process. These would be perfect for salt musubi later!

After lightly mixing it, I put the rice into the bowl I had prepared earlier. Let me try a bite first.

Delicious!!

No doubt about it, this is rice! All hail rice!

This might have been the first time in my life that I was so moved about eating rice.

It had some bounce to it, and the more I chewed, the sweeter it got. Basil’s eyes glistened as she nodded joyfully, her cheeks plump and full of rice.

After we each had a bite, I made a small cavity in the middle of the rice and cracked the egg into it. I sprinkled on a pinch of salt, cut the egg yolk and mixed it all with the rice. Then I shared some with Basil and, our eyes locking, we each took a bite.

S-s-so good!! Don’t underestimate rice with egg on top!! Simplicity really is the best!

I snuck a glance at Basil, who was completely smitten and ravenously digging into her share. Although I just wanted a bite, I ended up finishing what was in my bowl and even went for seconds.

That the sight of me, moved to tears by rice with egg on top, was spied on by the people of the Claude mansion from the kitchen entrance was something I would not know about until later.

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Man, you know you’re an asian when the sight of cooked white rice makes you happy. (These pictures are making me happy and now I really, really want rice…)
…Unless you don’t like rice. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, you should probably see a doctor for that.

Rice with egg on top (recipe in Japanese), in other words tamago kake-gohan (TKG). Ugh, it’s so good. Don’t try this with unfresh eggs, your stomach might hate you.

Okay, imagine rice…but portable and in a triangle shape and lightly salted. This is salt musubi (shio musubi) (recipe in Japanese)

Okay now imagine the same thing, but the rice is lightly browned and crunchy because it was kept on the pan for a teensy bit too long. That’s scorched rice (o-koge, lit. “burnt rice”). Picture from bon appetit,

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