Centering Rice

+ the need to go back to our roots

Our first guest came over on Friday for a casual lunch and to check out our new place. Like me, she’s a mother who enjoys spending time in nature, and also like me, she’s lived in San Diego before relocating to the DC area. We bond over our adjacent ancestry, hers being Taiwan and mine being the Philippines. She brought over Lo Mai Gai, one of my favorite dim sum dishes that I love so much I’ve learned to make it myself. It includes morsels of marinated chicken and mushrooms, wrapped in lotus leaves and steamed with sticky rice. Before she arrived, I spent the morning tidying up, so I decided to make something simple. I started my Tatung rice cooker and prepped sitaw I found at the local H Mart for an adobong sitaw dish. Small bites of bacon, garlic, and onion filled the room with the aroma I would want to smell when I walk into someone’s home. I had the same thought about the rice. There is no greater comforting scent than the subtle smell of freshly cooked white rice.

Rice being harvested in another province in Luzon.

Nostalgia

Rice has been a staple in my diet since I was a toddler and continues to create meaningful experiences daily. I was lucky to be introduced to rice by my Lola, who was raised in the Pangasinan province of Luzon, and was exposed to rice through past generations of cultivation. As a young child in the 80s, I quickly developed a palate for fat through my Lola’s familiarity with canned food. She would cook me Vienna sausages and canned corned beef fried with onion. The success of those meals would and could only be enhanced with freshly cooked white rice. I learned that white rice was a necessary fixture of each and every meal. For breakfast, eggs weren’t satisfying unless they were served with white rice.

As a teenager, I visited my Filipino friends homes often. Getting a chance to eat dinner with them meant there would be fresh white rice. Rice was so significant to home life that we’d joke about seeing remnants of white rice stuck to our stocks. I would keep finding comfort in this grain that seemed to represent so much—a shared history, hospitality, a sense of belonging. By the time I was 18 and ready to leave for college, I packed a rice cooker for one. Little did I know I wouldn’t be able to use it in my dorm room as the steam would trigger the smoke alarm.

Left, me in the kitchen around 7 years old, likely after eating something delicious Lola made. Right, me in my freshman dorm. Not pictured, my rice cooker.

Exploration

Since those days, it’s rare for me not to have rice daily. It’s also been a gateway grain to deepening my familiarity with other Asian cultures. Within the first year I moved to New York post-college I found myself working at a Japanese tea house in the East Village. We served Japanese comfort food that would be presented in wide, flat, woven boxes, with 5 filled ceramics, including one with 15-grain rice. I still haven’t been to Japan, but my love affair with Japanese food goes beyond restaurant experiences. Learning to cook Japanese food has taught me so much about subtle enhancements to natural ingredients, like seaweed, mushroom, fish, and vegetables. I now use Japanese short-grain rice even more that Jasmine. Knowing when and how to use short-grain rice has extended beyond cooking Japanese food. When I started cooking Hawaiian foods like Spam musubi and fried rice, and Korean foods like bulgogi and braised tofu, I readily had short-grain rice in the pantry. When I’ve had the option of cooking Jasmine rice, outside of when I make Filipino food, I’ve used it for Chinese dishes like stir-fry, Indian curries and even Mexican meals. My youngest, Hina, loves tasting the flavor of lime squeezed over freshly cooked Jasmine white rice, mixed with salt and cilantro.

Years of home-cooked meals I've made centered around rice.

Beauty

Perhaps the more advanced rice pantry staple I keep regularly available is sticky rice. I say advanced, because unlike Jasmine and Japanese short-grain, you have to soak sticky rice over night, and use a specific steamer to cook it. I was introduced to sticky rice through one of my teenage best friends. Through her, I fell in love with Laotian food at her large family gatherings where endless dishes of Lao food were shared. Sticky rice would be the way I understood the depth of fish sauce found in extra spicy papaya salad. My love for sticky rice grew when I saw the baskets used to serve sticky rice. I’ve since made it a point to collect rare and special sticky rice baskets whenever the opportunity presents itself. I also own a Laotian sticky rice steamer that has been very handy beyond cooking sticky rice. Beyond rice, I’ve used it to steam the most beautiful rice recipes wrapped in leaves, including Lo Mai Gai.

Left, we went to Raleigh last year for Spring Break. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Laotian restaurant and had to order sticky rice. Right, hosting Hina's 4th birthday. I used a larger sticky rice basket to serve fried rice.

Rice has been on my mind lately because of our recent move. When emotions run high, we turn to foods that comfort us. It also has been a food I’ve turned to because of the outrageous news headlines. We are living in a time when food security feels like a privilege for so many. In the last week, we saw a spike in increased gas prices when there’s already inflation. Food isn’t just there to comfort us, it is there to sustain us. I find comfort in knowing rice has always been there, not just for my generation, but for generations past of my own lineage. In times of poverty, rice has been the staple, and in times of conflict, rice has accompanied creative solutions to how we find pleasure.

I hope rice provides some relief for you this week.

x Vanessa