Japanese rice is so good. I'm so used to Thai and Mexican styles of rice though that one day when my grandmother made a pot of Japanese styled rice I was just very Put off? Like it tasted wrong and I was disappointed because it wasn't jasmine rice or lovely cracked rice. It was good rice. It was cooked right and everything. But I was so accustomed to other kinds of rice that my expectations of rice are those other kinds. This was a profound moment that left me feeling very strange for a couple hours. I SAW GOD IN A POT OF RICE. Well more the distortions of reality based on my expectations and attachments but yeah.
Culture shock wise for me and away from rice... I've been doing work for Japanese class. Again I am just amazed at how much mascots are a thing there. Atsuma has its own little mascot. He is a cute little kid called Atsuma-kun who likes rice balls and surfing. There is a page on the town's website devoted entirely to him. There are pictures of kids getting pictures with him. A town has a mascot. All the department stores I looked up had mascots. Companies have mascots. Part of me expects things like hospitals to mascots. It is the to the point where I want to write a jokey ethnography about the worship of tutelary gods like Anpan-man. Like the essay about the Nacirema's sadistic tooth rituals (it's about American dentistry but so couched in typical anthro-talk that it sounds like some exotic bullshit culture and the paper is used to help teach people about how easy it is to exotify cultures). Though honestly with how Tama was promoted to Celestial Station Master I do wonder if the mascot thing is indeed related to Japan's culture of tutelary god worship. Like those are just a really big thing. And whereas Ireland's tutelary god thing was lost Japan managed to keep hold of it for much longer.
'cause casseroles are a lot less labor-intensive than making enchiladas properly and are at least decent, if not as good as actual enchiladas. Re: rice: my experience with frying dry rice before adding liquid has mostly been with risotto. Which is delicious, but you want an audiobook or something while you're cooking it because it needs babysitting. My roommates do that with noodles too and I'm equally "!?" when I accidentally eat something they added butter to. About the only things I commonly add butter to are toast and baked potatoes.
Man i feel you, my family puts butter on everything, my dad puts butter on cupcakes for Christ's sake. Butter on noodles, butter for frying stuff, butter on all forms of pasta and potatoes, butter on any bread. We never eat rice but im sure if we had, we would have put butter in it.
I didn't realize it was called cracking rice, but I've done that before! It's fucking delicious. Never tried making sweet rice, but I might give it a shot-- we've got the glutinous rice for our mochi machine, so that's the hardest part down. Has anyone ever tried cooking rice in coconut milk? It's something my dad used to do a lot, and I love it so much.
I cook it in coconut milk for rice dessert, but I've never done it for salty stuff. I wanna try, because the coconut rice I had when I was in Colombia was divine, but it's one of those things where you're afraid to fuck up and ruin even your memories of the thing.
When I moved from California (SF Bay Area) to rural East Anglia (England), I was prepared for most of the cultural differences, via my English dad and frequent visits to English family. Some, however, I was not expecting. First thing that was seriously noticeable in school: where Californians would say "What's up?", the English would say "Are you okay?", and vice versa. In the US "are you okay?" implies something is wrong, but in the UK "what's up?" implies something is wrong, so there were a lot of misunderstandings. It was about a week and a half of my new friends asking if I was okay and me saying "yeah, why?" before I realised it was a greeting. English people found it bizarre and hilarious that we actually had yellow school buses in America. Americans had a similar reaction when I told them that I went to school every day in a purple double decker bus. I also love explaining to British people that the scene in Mean Girls where Regina's mom offers to give her friends alcohol is supposed to indicate that she is a bad mother. (It's also fun to explain to Americans that British people don't pick up on that.) In a lot of American cultures (varying by class/region/culture background), you're supposed to take an abstinence-only approach to underage drinking. Even if you privately accept it, actually saying that openly is taboo. Giving alcohol to someone else's child? That's crossing a whole other line. But to British people, the scene comes off totally differently: of course you know and accept that teenagers are gonna drink, so saying that you'd be okay with them having a little bit of alcohol as long as it's at home is a pretty conservative approach. My teetotal (more like straightedge) American mother was EXTREMELY freaked out by that particular cultural difference when she saw it in action. I was invited to a friend's fifteenth birthday party, and his generally-very-overprotective parents decided they would let us all have one Bacardi Breezer each, as a treat. Beforehand, however, his mother called up all the guests' parents to check that this was alright with them. By English standards, this was still pretty conservative and cautious of her: most of our classmates, their parents would just assume automatically that other parents knew that we'd be experimenting with alcohol when we went to parties. Setting a "one alcopop per person" limit was pretty conservative in the first place, but actually bothering to call up all the parents to confirm was really over-the-top cautiousness. Apparently, my mother said no, assuming automatically that I wouldn't want to drink anyway (since she and I agreed on most things and she figured alcohol was one of them). She then told me about the call later on in a tone of bafflement, as if a Mormon had just invited her to an orgy or something. (She also asked me if I did want a Bacardi Breezer, but she said it in a tone that made it clear that she was fully expecting the answer to be no.) On a related topic: at the start of each academic year at university, I took it upon myself to identify all the international/exchange students from the US and make sure that they knew that they should not refer to "holding a drink in each hand" as "double fisting". The interaction usually went: "Just so you know, they don't say that here. If you say it to someone they will be pretty confused and grossed out." "Wait, why? Why would they... oh. Ooooooohhh."
Florida, microwave for baggies and the electric kettle for looseleaf. The kettle has specific temp differences depending on tea type, so that handles all that for us. Also sweet tea is made by boiling water for tea bags and mixing sugar in while it's still hot, then putting it all in the fridge to cool down. Not by adding sugar to some iced tea you made after the fact. edit: Oh, and I don't add sugar or anything to hot tea. Sometimes we brew certain fancy teas from Teavana with rock sugar added, but for the most part I drink it straight.
Brazil. Kettle for everything, sugar or honey, no milk/cream, but we do put milk in our coffee. There's also Yerba mate, which is not strictly tea, but we drink a lot here in the south. Speaking of coffee, American coffee is weak piss. An Americano here is a watered down cup of regular brewed coffee.
canada: we always had an electric kettle so u just pour boiling water into ur mug which contains either a tea bag or a thingy to hold loose leaf tea. i sometimes put a bit of honey or sweetener in black tea, but my mom thinks thats odd and just puts milk in hers. (sips beverage) (i also put milk in, except green bc i barely drink that anyway) we have a family friend from newfoundland, i think she puts sugar in tea? i might be mixing up visual memories of coffee and tea idk. she asks if we want "regular or green tea", regular probably being orange pekoe iirc eta: we have yerba mate at places that sell looseleaf, like bulk food stores and specialty tea shops. i think we just make it like other looseleaf teas, i put milk and honey in it bc i'm weird
That's about what an Americano is, yeah. Although here I think it's a watered down espresso? Either way I don't get it, but I also drink overbrewed espresso blends on the regular, so. My step-dad used to make coffee by taking the old pot and pouring it into the water container to brew a new pot with that instead of water.
Yeah, that's what it's supposed to be. Tea: I have no recollection of how I did it in my USAdian youth, but now for hot it's 'pour water from electric kettle over teabag or tea ball, let steep, serve.' Sometimes I'll use my terracotta teapot if J and I want the same kind of looseleaf tea at the same time. Milk or milk and honey for black teas, nothing for green teas unless I'm sick, in which case honey. For iced, I coldbrew it from teabags, and usually don't put anything in it. I... don't know how people in Finland usually do it, other than using an electric kettle. They're terribly convenient, even moreso than a microwave since you can't superheat your water. :')
UK: electric kettle, always. If you have money and time, looseleaf tea in a teapot and a strainer to pour it through into the mug; if you don't, teabag in the mug. You can have milk, sugar, or lemon, but none of those are necessary. 'Builder's tea' here refers to 'very strong black tea that will stain the mug', and derives from... classism, basically, but the direct etymology is 'this is the tea that the builder/plumber/whatever working on your house will prefer to drink'.
USA and i don't really tea, but there's an electric kettle in the house for it. mostly i make tea, then forget about it. here in the us most of the time tea comes in premade bags, thank god, or else tea would be the most spoon intensive shit for me. although it is also sold looseleaf if you want it. (I'm in washington right now, but i know this applies to most of the states i think)
...oh! Huh. I found a cultural difference while watching a lot of ANTM, which is semi-related: there are a lot of young American adults on there who are celibate/waiting until marriage. I mean, I knew that was a thing, but I didn't realise it was like. A thing. Tea: like Lib. UK, electric kettle, pour boiling water over a teabag in a mug and add milk (for just me) or over 2-3 bags in a teapot if I'm at my parents' house and making for several people. I've never added lemon, though.
iced tea is big with my parents too. like. you make a fuckton of tea in a pot on the stove. mix in some sugar usually while it's hot. then put it over ice and shove it in the fridge. you make it extra strong so the ice like waters it down to drinkable standards. refreshing on a summer day
@Void doesn't the tannin make it bitter if it's really strong? I've never really made or drunk iced tea apart from powdered stuff, though I know some UK people do.
My boyfriend and I drink coffee which might just as easily be straight up black paint, so the couple of times we were abroad it was pretty hard for us - I mean, not so much for me because I like tea, but he wasn't so lucky. And he wasn't with me in the US, where even my mom, which drinks what we lovingly call "teaffee", complained. I had never seen her order an espresso before. Iced tea isn't really a thing here, except for like. Lipton iced tea cans and Yerba mate with peach/lemon preparations like that. But even then it's not exactly common.
