Comfort food.

"Can you wait at least a half hour?"  I ask the kids, as we troup into the house.  "Dinner won't be ready for up to 45 minutes."  They chorus their assents, and take off to do the sorts of things they do while waiting for food.

After a long, rather difficult day at work, who doesn't crave comfort food?  Unfortunately, Rob was not around to provide it tonight, so I had to rise to the challenge.

Rob claims that every Chinese girl he met at university had a rice cooker.  I refrain from trying to figure out how many girls he became acquainted with well enough to learn this 'fact', but I remain skeptical that his sample size was large enough to create a statistical norm.  The mind wanders.

Anyway, this is a dish I used to make with a friend while we were living in our dormitories, and wanted a late night snack.  In those times, we used canned niblet corn, because we did not always have access to refrigeration, but now, I use frozen corn.  Less sodium, and every bit as good. 

What am I talking about?  A combination of rice, Chinese sausage cut in bite size pieces and corn.  That's it!  You add a little extra water to the rice after you've washed it, and throw the other two ingredients in the pot.  Turn the rice cooker on and walk away for about 20 minutes and check.  When the 'rice cooking' button pops up, you stir the mixture and unplug the cooker.  (Everyone knows that you can't just eat the rice immediately after the button pops up, right?)  Leave the rice mix for at least ten minutes, and spoon out and serve. 

I only cut up 3 sausages, and there was not quite enough with a starting point of 2 cups raw rice.  I should have put in more corn too - probably at least 2 cups.  How was I to know the kids would like it as much as their mother?

Now I know my kids will be fine when they go away to university.  A rice cooker is not just for girls, but Rob probably never spent time checking out the boys.