Rice oh rice

I'm getting tired of the hoo-ha about rice-cooking. Even companies are using that joke in their advertisements; it's getting pretty stale. It wasn't even that funny to begin with...

I'm not sure whether the majority of people really think that draining rice after cooking it is worth ridiculing, or maybe it's just that the minority are noisier. But if you think about it, so many foods are boiled and then drained. If rice weren't such a staple in Malaysia, if it were a foreign food only available at high-end restaurants, don't you think you might buy a pack of rice and try boiling and draining it to cook your "high-end meal"? I'm not saying we can't have a chuckle when we see the way "foreigners" cook rice, but hey, didn't they make it edible?

I remember the first time I cooked rice with a French friend (don't remember why we were cooking rice :P ), and when I asked her whether she had washed the rice, she stared at me and said, "We have to wash rice? Why? We don't wash pasta." I didn't have an answer at the time, but after that I did think about it and figured that pasta is processed from washed ingredients, whereas rice isn't. (I hope I'm right about the pasta :P )

As for draining the rice...some packets of rice that I saw being sold in France really had those instructions on their packets!