Freezing Rice: Super Cool Kitchen Secret

Rice is nice. . .that's what they say. Rice is nice. . .throw some my way. Remember that song?

Rice can be great but come dinner time, I'm disinclined to fiddle around with cooking it, especially the ultimate - brown rice. But hal-le-lu-jah, there's an easy-peasy way. And that is to cook the whole big bag and freeze it in meal-sized portions.

You see, there was a kilo of rice that was sitting in the cabinet calling my name, singing that Rice is Nice song. So I gave in, cooked it up and most of it's frozen in small portions. Then come dinner time, throw the rice onto a hot skillet and it's done in no time. So here's the methodika, as we say it around here.

While water is coming to a boil, pick through for any pebbles, diamonds or other precious stones. Not that I've ever found any, but there's always a first time. Then run some water through the rice and boil it until just a tad under-done.


Talk about quick rice, here in the blink of an eye, in the flash of the cursor - our rice is cooked. Rinse it off in cool water using the strainer. Then cool to room temperature in shallow pans.


After cool, package the rice for freezing. These quart-size zip-lock bags I bring from the US and put 2 cups rice in each bag. That works here in this household of three, which includes two little birds. They're such gentleman though, they let me have all the rice. So package it according to how much rice you would serve at a meal.

In the freezer, these packets stack nicely. Being thin, it's easy to break of a chunk of rice and slide it out onto a hot skillet.


Happens that we have a hot skillet here, two in fact. One for heating the rice, the other for whatever else is cooking. In this case it's chicken chunks, straight out of the freezer too.


And here we have an easy lunch, ready in about 15 minutes.

Try freezing rice sometime. It's more economical than the boil-in-the-bag packets, which are not always available here. It's so handy come dinner time because there's no messing w/ a big pot of water and then cleaning it up after. So that settled, altogether now, a rousing rendition of rice is nice!