Burnt Rice

Rice cooks slowly but when it burns it burns all at once.

Countries don’t just plummet to the right. To say that is to be ignorant to the spread of political leanings. Countries tip oh so slowly, over time—I would call it disease adjacent for sure. A dramatic example that we can all clearly reference is the Titanic. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, no one up top knew what was going on right after the collision. They of course felt the collision but were informed that everything was fine and so they took that confirmation at face value. Meanwhile, from below, each compartment began to flood with water starting from the bottom and working its way to the top, level by level. The bow began to sink and the stern eventually stood up vertically like a literal skyscraper in NYC quickly resulting in the ship snapping in half and sinking. The whole thing took about 2 hours and 40 mins but for a good chunk of that time, many of the people on board didn’t have a fucking clue of the severity of the situation. I feel like I don’t even need to say that that’s us but yeah. We collectively are the clueless people on the Titanic. Some of us knew this was coming sooner than others mind you, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop the ship from sinking. Some people started playing music on deck to bring some light into the situation, some people started organizing and getting people onto life boats, some people just gave up and jumped off the edge. Oh yeah, and like our trusty Titanic analogy, we America do not have enough life boats :)

I want to share a traditional Iraqi recipe with you that suddenly feels very fitting in my Aquarius mind. Hikaka, a buttery rice dish with a golden crunchy top—Tahdig’s Iraqi cousin. The Iraqi word “hikaka” means “bottom of the pot” because the crunchy buttery goodness starts off at the bottom of the pot and then when it’s ready for presentation, said pot is then flipped to reveal a stunning flaxen mountain of rice. Before I get into it, my very first time making hikaka—scratch that—my ONLY time making hikaka, I stood there for what felt like hours. Frantically taking instructions from my mom over the phone, I thought that I did everything right. I did not. Granted, I was in college and not in my cooking era yet. My signature recipe at the time was…wait for it…a cheese quesadilla. I stood there watching the rice cook, and somehow the rice still royally burned at the bottom of the pan and it took days for me to completely scrub it off. This ordeal has since scared me off from making hikaka (although I think it’s time to try again soon). Did I add enough butter? Did I use a crappy pot? At that point, I could talk about it for ages and still arrive at the same conclusion, that it took ZERO time to fuck the whole thing up and it will take a long ass time to clean up the mess I made. America is the burnt rice at the bottom of the pot—and I don’t know how long it will take to clean up or if we will just throw the pot away and start over, but whatever we do, we fucked up and we all have to deal with the consequences. Anyway, here is my mom’s hikaka recipe in her own words (via text):