Cooking with FLAVOR!

Some of you already know this, but back The Olden Days of Yore I (Vanessa) was a cook at Alfalfa (the old one, on South Lime). If you know these days of which I speak, you might remember that every dinner entrée at one time came with 1 of 2 side dishes: spinach noodles or brown rice. EVERY dinner order. That's a lot of spinach noodles and brown rice to cook every day.

I often had the prep cook shift, which meant I was preparing all the items needed for making dinners to order. And I COULD NOT cook brown rice without burning it. Like, way more than 5 times out of 10 was I burning the rice. Like, the evening dishwasher, Red, would know if I was the prep cook that day, because he'd start his shift, see the burned rice pot full of stuck-on rice, and proclaim, "Nessa's been cooking with FLAVOR!" It got to the point where I was delaying putting the rice on it because I "just knew" I was going to mess it up. And late/missing rice is not much better than burnt rice when it comes to a busy dinner shift. My fear of failing to cook the rice properly was not helping anyone.

So what happened? A few things. The most important being that I asked for cooking pointers from more experienced kitchen folks. And I reminded myself that it wasn't necessarily a given that I was going to burn the rice every time - and that there were factors I could control to help boost my success. And little by little, those 5/10 odds grew more and more in my (and potential diners') favor. In the big game of rice/life, I learned that very rarely was a failure my only option.

Resources can of course be a privilege and are not accessible to all, but please remember that you have us at EatWell to help you navigate through whatever is currently making you feel just as stuck as those poor bits of brown rice.

(And just in case you too have burned a pan or 2 in your time, check out these 5 ways to clean a burned-on pot from The Kitchn.)