HOW TO USE A RICE COOKER

From afar, the conversation of the workmen a few gardens over sounds like "kuhongina hamungina". Which I tried to recognize as meaningful till I realized that distance distorted things, and it was in a language I do not speak in any case. So, like my partment mate years ago watching a Taiwanese soap opera, I invented my own dialogue. And actually she wasn't watching so much as simply being in the same room as I was. I was watching. She noticed that the plump ayah and the little girl of the family wept an awful lot (there have to be several weeping jags in a Chinese soap opera otherewise it's not good) and invented some disaster involving cheese in the rice cooker as part of helpfully rendering it in English.

Dramatic exclamations, recrimination, and several well-known cheese names. The result was something of which I gladly would have watched all episodes. Monty Python's cheese shop sketch in a Chinese teevee drama format. Cheddar, mozzarella, and parmesan are widely known in Taiwan, and they have learned how to make cheesy poofs over there along the Japanese model. Which are sort of popular. Asians outside of Indonesia aren't really hep to Gouda, and I would imagine that Limburger is entirely out of the question.

The charcoal grilled bacon cheesburger with thick slices of still juicy apple-wood smoked bacon and oozy melted blue cheese is, probably, not a thing yet there.
Mmmm, also add a big scoop of sautéed mushrooms!

Sounds like an ideal breakfast.

AUTUMN MORNING IN BRABANT

By the way: the cardiologist who performed the angioplasty described the arterial buildup as being rather like parmesan. Really aged parmesan. Feel the Parmigiano Reggiano, little penguin, be the Parmigiano Reggiano, become one with the Parmigiano Reggiano!

What in Dutch we would refer to as an 'oude belegen kaas'.

There's a well-known theory, expressed best in Dutch, that we Netherlanders invented cheese ages ago and all those other Europeans merely imitated us. From which I could deduce that consequently angioplasties also must have been invented there.
Probably by doctor Goropius in the sixteenth century.


Trying to make cheesy poofs at home was undoubtedly what ruined that rice cooker. They're not built for that. Something my apartment mate instinctively knows (she's of Cantonese stock), but plump Minnanwa speaking maidservants in Taiwan probably wouldn't.
Cheese, ricecookers? Newfangled! Combine the two for better!

But I encourage you to experiment.

Aged Gouda, I think.



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