The Get-Off-Your-Phone Rice

I have found myself cooking more lately. Or, at least, cooking more new things.

Cooking itself will always be a daily need, I’m afraid, as long as I have children at home who might not be satisfied with the same bowl of soup every night. I, for one, would be fine with that. A bowl of soup and a good hunk of bread, perhaps with a piece of cheese, on good days.

That is what I usually serve my family on Fridays, when we’re not going out.

Alas, there are all the other days. Those days are the reason I started this blog a few years ago.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about, but I knew I was a mother who spent a lot of time in her kitchen.

Things haven’t changed since then, and I still need to go with what little I have.

Eighteen months after moving back to New York, I have spent enough time at home helping the children – and mostly myself – readjust to our former lives. I am ready for paid work, even if paid work doesn’t seem quite ready for me.

Mostly I am ready to not be home every day when the kids come home from school. Ready to not be the one picking them up, taking them to their activities and supervising their homework. Ready not to be the one making dinner every single day.

But that time isn’t here yet, and I need to find a way to make peace with where I am.  Which involves a lot of distraction and boredom, when the kids are around.

I have noticed it lately. The minute we walk through the door, a strong resistance sets in. It takes me time to hang my coat, take off my shoes, gets the boys set up for homework. I quite literally drag my feet and will often pull out my phone at that moment. These days, I can be found doomscrolling on various newspapers websites, or worse, Twitter (sorry, can’t bring myself to using the new name brought about by that guy) or Bluesky.

Anything to not start the routine right away. To delay the moment when I must start cooking while checking homework and supervising piano practice – i.e., yelling orders from the stove and turning red and puffy from the heat and exhaustion.

The news has been so overwhelming lately, it’s hard not to get buried in that phone.

Will my home continent and my adopted country split forever? Will I be the enemy when I go back to France this Spring? Will the U.S. still be a democracy a year from now? How long will I even be here? Will I be able to move back home at some point? When would that be?

Things have been so scary and disorienting since the new year begun, I have found myself needing some very basic, physical reassurance.      

And that is not something our phones can provide, for all the illusions of relief they give us when we mindlessly grab them.

Last week, however, it became clear that I needed something else to get me through the after-school phase of my day.

And then, on Sunday, while toiling on my weekly, grandmotherly crossword puzzle from the New York Times Magazine, I saw the Ottolenghi cookbook I have never opened, sitting on the cookbook shelf I mostly use as decoration.  

When was the last time I cooked from a cookbook?  More often than not I pull recipes from my phone. Again.    But that day the prospect of turning actual pages seemed irresistible.

Getting home and knowing the book is there, waiting for me. Knowing that all I have to do is to follow instructions.

Take out the planners from the backpacks. Have the boys sit down. Take out the garlic, the spices, the pasta from the pantry cabinet.     Answer the question about the “passé compose”. Dictate the words.            Salt the fish, put the olive oil in the pan.

Monitor the piano practice from afar. Lose my mind a little.

Go back to the vegetables, the peeler, the broiler.     

For the past few days my cookbook has been my anchor.

When I get pulled away and go take a sneak peek at my screen, I know I can go back to the paper, the photos, the mess on my kitchen counter. The world might be falling apart, my brain might be aging and drowning me in ADHD, but those things are THERE.

There is a recipe to follow and while I am following it I do not to think.    

Instead of a meal preparation I dread, it becomes a grounding practice.       I’m not sure how long this will last.  

At this point next week, I will probably be huffing and puffing again, complaining that my life is a never-ending series of mindless, tedious chores.            

For now, however, I will enjoy the relief that a simple cookbook provides me.

Simple is the name of the book. I’m sure many of you have cooked from it already; it’s not exactly a rare find. Trying one recipe a day has been lifesaving for me though. I haven’t been impressed with everything. A couscous salad was more time-consuming that it needed to be, and I’ve made more flavorful ones before, in half the time and with half the ingredients.

This rice, however, hit the spot. I made it alongside a salmon that already had a pretty strong relish to accompany it, and the two salsas overpowered each other, as I should have surmised. But I will keep the baked rice as reference for a bright, satisfying side with any meat or fish.

As Ottolenghi points out it is such an easy, foolproof way to cook rice, one wonders why one doesn’t use this method every time.        

So go ahead and get yourselves off Twitter (i know, it's not called that anymore but you should still get yourselves off of it right now), or Instagram, or Tik Tok, or whatever it is that you are hooked on, and grab a cookbook instead. And make something like this rice.

Something slow that gets your hand dirty. We need it oh so much these days.

Ingredients

• 400g Basmati Rice: approx. 2 cups

• 50g Unsalted Butter: 3 ½ tablespoons (slightly less than half a stick)

• 800ml Boiling Water: approx. 3 ⅓ cups

• 50g Mint: about 2 large bunches

  • 40g (on sprigs): about 1 ½ cups loosely packed sprigs

  • 10g (shredded): approx. ¼ cup shredded leaves

• 150g Feta: 5.3 ounces (or approx. 1 cup crumbled)

• Salt and Black Pepper: to taste

Salsa Ingredients

• 40g Pitted Green Olives: approx. ¼ cup sliced

• 90g Pomegranate Seeds: approx. ½ cup (from 1 small pomegranate)

• 50g Walnut Halves: approx. ½ cup

• 3 tbsp Olive Oil

• 1 tbsp Pomegranate Molasses

• 1 Small Garlic Clove

  
  

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 230°C/ 450° F fan, or as high as your oven will go.

   
   

2. Place the rice in a high-sided ovenproof dish, size about 20x30cm/8x11 inches. Season with ¾ teaspoon of salt and plenty of pepper, then pour over the butter and boiling water.

   Top with the sprigs of mint and cover the dish tightly with tin foil so that the rice is well sealed. Bake for 25 minutes, until the rice is light and fluffy and all the liquid has been absorbed.

   
   

3. Meanwhile, place all the ingredients for the salsa, minus the 10g shredded mint, in a medium bowl with ¼ teaspoon of salt. Mix well and set aside.

   
   

4. Take the rice out of the oven. Remove and discard the foil. Pull the leaves off the mint sprigs – the stalks can be discarded – then place these back on the rice and sprinkle with the feta. Just before serving, stir the shredded mint into the salsa and spoon evenly over the rice. Serve hot.