Noodle Rice Pilaf

April. Cherry blossoms along the waterfront that no one is walking under. Spring happening to a city that is indoors, watching through windows, the beauty wasted on empty sidewalks. I look at the cherry blossoms from the apartment balcony and think of Fumiko, who walked to see them every spring in Sacramento, and who is not walking anywhere now, because she is dead, and the deadness is a fact I have absorbed into my daily consciousness the way the body absorbs vitamin D — slowly, invisibly, essentially. She is gone. She has been gone for two years. The cherry blossoms do not know this. The cherry blossoms do not care. They bloom because blooming is what they do, regardless of who is watching, regardless of who is gone.

I made sakura mochi — the pink rice cakes wrapped in cherry blossom leaves that Fumiko made every spring. The mochi is sweet, the leaf is salty, the combination is spring in one bite. Making sakura mochi requires pickled cherry blossom leaves, which I mail-ordered from a Japanese specialty supplier in California, because even in a pandemic, the mail still delivers cherry blossoms, which is either absurd or beautiful, and I choose beautiful, because the alternative is unbearable.

Miya and I have developed a quarantine routine that revolves around the kitchen. Mornings: miso soup together, her on the stool, stirring. Midday: a cooking project — simple, hands-on, something she can touch. Today we made rice balls shaped like animals. Hers was "a bunny" — a triangle with two rice grain ears. Mine was "a bear" — a circle with nori eyes. We lined them up on the plate and Miya named each one and I photographed them for the blog and the post was the lightest thing I've written in months: just rice and a child and the shapes that love takes when love is three years old and has not yet learned to be complicated.

Brian is drinking every day now. Not heavily — not falling-down, not slurring — but consistently, the way a faucet drips: steady, constant, impossible to ignore once you've noticed it. The beer appears at three. Sometimes two. He opens it in the kitchen and carries it to the bedroom and the sound of the can opening is a clock I am tracking without wanting to. Two-thirty today. Two-fifteen yesterday. The clock is running backwards. The drink is arriving earlier. The arrival is an arithmetic I do not want to solve because the answer is alcoholism and the word "alcoholism" is a door I am not ready to open because once you open it you have to walk through it and walking through it means saying: my husband has a problem, and the problem is not the marriage, the problem is the bottle, and the bottle and the marriage are the same problem.

After the bunny and the bear were named and photographed and eaten—after Miya had licked the soy from her fingers and declared the bear “the winner”—I found myself still standing at the counter, not ready to stop making things with rice. There is something in the ritual of toasting and stirring that quiets the mind, the same way folding mochi leaves quiets it, the same way Fumiko’s kitchen always felt like a place where time moved at a kinder speed. This noodle rice pilaf is the dish I turned to next: nothing precious, nothing complicated, just toasted noodles and rice doing what simple things do best—showing up, warm and steady, in the middle of a hard spring.

Prep Time: 5 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 30 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup long-grain white rice
1/2 cup thin egg noodles or vermicelli, broken into 1-inch pieces
2 1/4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped (optional, for serving)

Instructions

Toast the noodles. Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the broken noodle pieces and cook, stirring frequently, for 3–4 minutes until golden brown and fragrant. Watch carefully—they turn fast.
Add the rice. Stir in the dry rice and continue toasting for 1–2 minutes, until the rice grains are lightly coated in butter and beginning to turn translucent at the edges.
Season and add broth. Stir in the garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. Pour in the broth and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring once to combine.
Simmer covered. Reduce heat to low, cover tightly, and cook for 18–20 minutes, until the rice is tender and all the liquid has been absorbed. Do not lift the lid during cooking.
Rest and fluff. Remove from heat and let sit, covered, for 5 minutes. Uncover, fluff gently with a fork, and taste for salt. Scatter parsley over the top if using, and serve warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Noodle Rice Pilaf — The Shapes That Love Takes When She Is Three