Hot Buttered Rice

After a day that was a day in a series of days.

Today I had a day.

I had to do the first part of a crown, which is for me a difficult undertaking that requires drama and multiple friends and my husband in attendance. Honestly I would like my children and parents gathered around me, too, and I would not be my usual helpful self, ready to make them dinner or drive them to get a sandwich.

I would require that they wait on me, hand and foot, and speak in whispers when they are in my room because the dentist is scary and a crown is not at all the regal reward it sounds like, and also because it is a lot more fun to have people make a big fuss when you know you’re not really that sick or injured that when you are.

The second best thing is to be left alone to care for yourself as you see fit, and what I chose was a nice nap, the kind where you wake up occasionally and wonder what animal that is on your foot and then you go back to sleep and then you wake up because a different animal is trying to get under your pillow and then you have done nice hot buttered rice.

Any rice will do here, even Minute Rice, but I favor sushi rice cooked in a rice cooker. To it, I add enough butter that every grain gleams, and then a couple of pinches of sea salt, big enough to even provide a little crunch.

This would be a bad choice after wisdom teeth, true, but it works quite well here, although accidentally chewing even that just a little with the offended tooth was an excellent reminder that I will be eating on the other side of my mouth for a while, certainly until the non-temporary version of this arrives.

It has also been a season, of good travel and long phone calls and walks with the kinda of people you can be silent with and unpleasant suprises and good and bad choices, which every season is, I guess, but this one does seem to be particularly overflowing, perhaps because I did not fully see it coming.

It’s a good night for hot buttered rice.

And also for Maria Semple’s Go Gently, which, at 4 chapters in, I really love. More on that topic later, I’m sure.

And if I was still in my last read, Anna Quindlen’s More Than Enough, that too would be fine. It’s cozy and discursive and very much in its lane and I enjoyed it. Plus, there are alpacas and a large animal vet, which felt like a bonus.

So… if you had a night alone after a day when you really deserved to just eat the simplest, softest, easiest thing that you could conjure up for yourself, what would it be?

I don’t have my usual signature in my phone, so please enjoy my little chicken instead.

KJ