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My first cooking experience and my first Cub Scout merit badge was cooking Minute Rice. Imagine my surprise at eight years of age that Minute Rice took five minutes to cook. "But it says minute rice," I insisted. To my little nine-year-old brain, that didn't seem right. I was so proud of myself, though, when it came out perfectly cooked; how can you ruin Minute Rice? I wanted to cook it every night for the remainder of the week. I had no idea then, but should have had a clue, how much I would learn to enjoy cooking. Fast forward to present.

I don't use processed rice any more. It is easy and tastes okay, but it lacks nutrition and fiber, the things for which we eat it. The processing to make it cook fast removes all the good qualities, and it only takes a few more minutes to cook unprocessed rice than it does processed rice.

Wild rice is my favorite, but it's not really rice. Brown rice has a nuttiness to it that I like. In China, they eat what we call sticky rice, here. There, it's just rice. The stickiness makes it easier to eat with chopsticks. I am now good enough with chopsticks to pick up a single grain of rice with chopsticks, so I don't cook the rice until its sticky.

Adding a splash of olive oil to the water will help keep the grains from sticking to each other, as with pasta. Theoretically, brown rice with olive oil should be sufficient nutrition without any additions. I don't know; I haven't tried it. I love to pile the rice around really good fish, or shrimp, or chickenanything, almost.

Saffron rice is popular at many restaurants, but most of them use fake saffron, I think. Saffron is very expensive, the most expensive seasoning in the world. It comes from the stamen of the purple crocus bloom, so guess what I do in Spring when the crocus bloom? I take a little jar and a pair of tweezers and pluck crocus stamens from the little purple blooms, which often poke up through the snow. They don't seem to mind as they smile their pretty faces at me and the morning sun. I strip the yellow dust off the stamens in the kitchen and make saffron rice for my friends. I now understand why it is so darn expensive, it's a pain and there is only enough for one dish of rice, but it's worth it.

I would never go to all that trouble and then serve it with Minute Rice, which takes more than a minute, for the record.

Learn more about this author, Will Kester.
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