Unpaid Ad: Dehumidified Rice

YOU KNOW THAT thing, where you’re reading a recipe online, and it tells you to do something you feel pretty confident from years or decades of experience is not the way to do that thing, but you do it anyway, because this person who writes recipes for a living must know better than you? This recipe has 4.91 stars from 43 reviews! And also you, for whatever reason, or for many, many reasons, are prone to doubting and/or fearing and/or hating your own experience and/or expertise?

Well, I do! The upshot for me tonight is that I ended up with extremely wet basmati rice. It had some expensive ghee and nice spices in it, which I took into consideration as I stood there debating whether to start over and remake it—this isn’t Top Chef! Bravo doesn’t buy my ghee (which feels kind of transphobic, Bravo). Plus I deserve to not suffer really bad rice if I don’t absolutely have to.

But, I realized after a moment: I have a dehumidifier. It was already on. It is, as long as I’m someplace I can plug in my house, always on. When I first arrived on my home-base farm in Western Washington, my landlords basically threatened me into buying it. “If you want to live in that RV for more than three months,” they said, “you need a dehumidifier.” I did want to live in it for longer than that, since I’d used the remainder of my life savings to purchase it and had nowhere else to go.

Shortly before I arrived here, when I’d still been in California, I’d gone to a beachfront RV campground on the recommendation of some other travelers and had noticed an older couple constantly wiping condensation from the ocean air off the insides of their windows. I’d seen it collecting on mine, too, so thick it dripped, and I had wondered: Should I be toweling this off, too? The short answer is yes. Even away from the water, the simple act of exhalation in such a small space creates a lot of moisture, and in the PNW, the humidity combined with it is too high for the structure’s longevity.

“There’s no mollllld,” some local friends said once, stepping into my house for the first time, looking around. They drew out the l in disbelief. They knew people living in various types of dwellings, RV and otherwise, and that was a rarity around here. My moldless house was so nice that it, they said, was many of those people’s RV or trailer goal, their ultimate endgame housing fantasy.

Not something they’d desperately downsized into and considered lacking. Not something they considered lesser than something else.

“I have a dehumidifier,” I said, oversimply.

Could it save my rice like it has saved my shelter? (If I empty its bucket before bed but sleep with a window open, even without rain here it often shuts off before morning because it’s full, though it holds almost three gallons.) I set the pot on a coaster on the floor in front of the unit, lid off. I went about finishing the dal I’d concocted on a whim—sudden visions of cumin seeds and yellow legumes had put me in motion. When I returned to the rice some 15 minutes later, it was indeed more edible than it had been before.

It didn’t have as much integrity as rice that hadn’t been overwatered to begin with, but it had way more than an overwatered rice that hadn’t been dehumidified.

It was a small triumph. Garnished with the quick-pickled red onion in lime I made from on-hand food bank ingredients and some cottage cheese (also food-bank scored), the whole meal turned out more wonderfully than I’d anticipated. The ultimate endgame fantasy of a meal. Not something that was at all lacking, lesser than something else.