Seductions of Rice

From the James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award-winning authors of Flatbreads and Flavors and Hot Sour Salty Sweet comes the paperback edition of what Cookbook Digest calls the perfect book on rice. It is a beautiful, comprehensive, and altogether fascinating overview of this ancient grain.
With a depth of passion and experience and an ability to embrace and convey richness of place and taste, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid embarked on an excursion to find the world's most essential and satisfying food. Along the way, they experienced firsthand dozens of varieties of rice that offer unimaginable subtleties of taste, as well as a staggering array of foods to accompany them, all providing simple ways to get flavor and variety on the table.
SEDUCTIONS OF RICE is the glorious result: two hundred easy-to-prepare dishes from the world's great rice cuisines, illuminated by stories, insights, and more than two hundred photographs of people, places, and wonderful food.

Chinese stir-frys, Spanish paellas, Japanese sushi, Indian thorans, Thai salads, Turkish pilafs, Italian risottos, Senegalese yassas, American gumbos: if rice isn't the heart and soul of all these diverse dishes, rice can be found piled right there at the side of the plate, or in a bowl. To say that Alford and Duguid, authors of the award-winning Flatbreads and Flavors, deliver the world of rice is much too simple an understatement. Your days of buying one rice to serve all purposes will end with even a cursory reading of this lovely book.
The authors are photographers as well as writers, but their greatest skill may be to travel the world at the level of the culture they visit. They seem able to drop away from Western culture and hunker right down with rice vendor or cook, no matter where.
Seductions of Rice opens with all the basics of rice, everything a reader would want to know and then some. Then on to the cultures of rice: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Central Asian, Mediterranean, Senegalese, and North American. Recipes either made from rice or to accompany rice range from Chinese Congee to Thai Green Papaya Salad to Japanese Quick Morning Miso Soup to South Indian Lentil Stew to Cuban Black Beans to Mexican Green Rice.
And in between? The authors fill in all the space between these diverse grains of rice with traveler's tales from the road. It is a luxurious book, a delicious book, a ripe combination of travel and taste. You leave off thinking that the world must be the shape of a rice ball. --Schuyler Ingle

This soup is inspired by the legendary wild rice soup at Lutsen Resort in Lutsen, MN. It's rich and creamy and not exactly the healthiest soup I've ever made, but it's so delicious and warming that the fat content doesn't seem to deter anyone from going back for seconds and thirds. This makes about 8-10 servings. Cut the recipe in half if you want less. It freezes very well, though, so I usually make the full batch and freeze several quarts in ziplock bags. In a medium saucepan, combine: 1 cup Wild Rice 3 cups water Cook rice and water together on low heat, covered, until the rice is tender, about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, saute in butter: 1 large onion, diced 3 carrots, diced 2 potatoes, peeled and diced Add: 2 cups chicken stock 1 cup water Cover and cook until the potatoes and carrots are tender. Add the cooked rice, 1 cup of milk or 1/2 cup of cream 1 small brick of Velveeta cheese, cut into little pieces. Simmer gently until the cheese is completely melted into the soup. Add more milk if the soup seems too thick.

Did some grocery shopping to fill up the empty shelves and prepped for the hard freeze that's about to hit Houston by making some soup to warm the tummy. Took a chicken & brown rice soup recipe and added more vegetables and garnished with green onions. Now I've got a big pot of it to help keep me warm for the next couple of days.

In this captivating memoir for young people, looking back with candor and affection, Condoleezza Rice evokes in rich detail her remarkable childhood.
Her life began in the comparatively placid 1950s in Birmingham, Alabama, where black people lived in a segregated parallel universe to their white neighbors. She grew up during the violent and shocking 1960s, when bloodshed became a part of daily life in the South. Rice’s portrait of her parents, John and Angelena, highlights their ambitions and frustrations and shows how much they sacrificed to give their beloved only child the best chance for success. Rice also discusses the challenges of being a precocious child who was passionate about music, ice skating, history, and current affairs. Her memoir reveals with vivid clarity how her early experiences sowed the seeds of her political beliefs and helped her become a vibrant, successful woman.
Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Parents and Me is a fascinating and inspirational story for young people.