Raining Rice

For most of my friends, the onset of the global pandemic meant running to the store in order to stock up on inventory items like toilet paper and paper towels. When my husband and I realized that we were also headed into lockdown, we reviewed our household supply of goods. Much to our relief, our garage held about a one-month supply of all paper necessities.

All was well with our world until I looked into the pantry.

For some reason, the one item that we lacked was rice. The simple white, “cooks in ten minutes” grain was almost gone from our kitchen. Determined to find my one lacking staple ingredient, I masked up and headed to the store. After all, how hard could it be to find quick cooking rice?

With a mixture of horror and disbelief, I stood in my local grocery and stared at the empty shelves. Were people really making a mad dash to buy every basic ingredient? I left the store without my intended purchase. Surely, I would find what I needed the next time I shopped.

Not surprisingly, the following week was a repeat of the same dismal outcome.

A small panic started to swell in my chest. Were cooks everywhere just determined to make chicken and rice casseroles in the new homebound world? Was it all about the red beans and rice now? Was everyone else enjoying pots of cooked, fluffy goodness and shaking their head at those of us that had failed to secure our Pre-Covid supply of carbohydrates?

The sheer lack of such a common food bothered me and, on a hunch, I went to my “member only warehouse” to check out my options. Standing in the middle of a wide aisle, I spotted the bags of rice. What I found was not just any white, long grain variety in tidy little bags, but twenty-pound sacks of all the staple food that I could ever want.

No, I thought, I can’t get that big amount. It is way too much for us.

But then a man stepped in front of me and grabbed a heavy bag for himself. He plopped it into his cart and turned to me. “It’s a great buy, good rice too.”

Before I knew it, I too had hauled a twenty-pound sack to the register. The man was right, the price per pound was remarkably low. And we could eat all the rice, couldn’t we?

The funny thing about warehouse shopping is how much bigger the large quantity purchases look once you get them home. Upon my return, my husband glanced in the back of my car and stared in disbelief.

“You bought enough rice for a whole year!” he exclaimed.

“It was a good buy, good price per pound,” I countered.

We have had plenty of lovely homemade recipes and now we are down to only about seventeen pounds of our favorite new side dish. Needless to say, my husband and son have had more fun teasing me about my purchase than I ever thought possible.

“Don’t worry,” my husbands joked. “If we still have extra rice at Christmas, we’ll just cook it and spread over the yard. We can pretend that it’s snow!”

“Watch it,” I said. “Or you won’t get dessert tonight.”

He fell silent. The last thing he wanted was to jeopardize getting a sweet surprise after dinner. Wait until he figures out that his special treat is rice pudding!