Where's the rice?

Yesterday we were in C-town and I did some shopping in preparation for Chinese New Year. I bought a bunch of items, including gifts for my parents and my other parents (aka my in-laws.) By the time we got home it was around 3pm. I decided to start prepping for dinner around 4pm since I knew it'd take me awhile. We had guests last night and I wanted to prep as much stuff as I could before they arrived.

My menu was very ambitious last night:
- salt and pepper fish fillet
- fish soup with 5-spice tofu
- a Macau dish of fried potatoes and minced pork
- sauteed large pee sprouts with button mushrooms
- roasted duck (from the supermarket)

I bought a whole dover sole that I decided would be best prepared two ways: salt and pepper fish fillet and soup. I set about filleting the fish and separating all the edible parts out to make soup. The task took much longer than I anticipated and it wasn't until nearly 5pm when I had the soup stock boiling away.

I also decided to mince my own pork. Yup, I had a chunk of pork that I hacked away at with a cleaver (not a food processor) so that it'd be homemade ground pork. I like homemade ground pork best since it has the best texture.

It took me much longer to do all the prep than I thought it would and my real cooking didn't even get started until 6:30pm. I aim to have dinner ready by 7pm but I was definitely going to miss that time. After I finally managed to get everything on the table (and everything had the right flavor profiles I was looking for) I realized I had forgotten to make rice! argh! I was so intent on creating all of these new dishes (none of which I'd ever made before) that I forgot to wash rice and make it. grr!

Luckily I know how to cook rice in a pot on the stove. I quickly started it and knew it'd be ready in 25 minutes. Our rice cooker takes 1 hour to make rice (it's one of those fancy schmancy fuzzy logic ones) so stove top method is the only way to go. By the time we finished our soup course the rice was nearly done so it wasn't that bad overall. Who else has forgotten to make rice? The thought didn't even cross my mind :(

If I didn't know how to make rice on the stove top then the entire dinner would have been delayed an additional hour. Ouch. I actually don't know anyone else (of my peers) who knows how to make rice on the stove top. Everyone has become so reliant on the rice cooker that they've forgotten the simple task of using a pot to cook rice in. What do they do? Just suck it up and wait an additional hour for the rice to cook before dinner can be served?

Another bummer of the evening was that during clean up I accidentally touched the blades of my food processor the wrong way and sliced my finger open. :( I've got a band-aid on it right now and it is very hard to do anything when you can't type the "i" key very well.