I ran out of stove-top space and large pots. It’s as simple as that. I was having some friends over for dinner and wanted to make an Indian meal. So that meant the dal (in this case red lentils) and squash both needed a large pot. The green beans could live with a small pot, but where would the rice go? I don’t have a rice cooker and I was doing brown rice anyway (which never works properly in the basic, inexpensive rice cookers I’ve used before) so my two options were to either transfer the dal to a bowl (I had cooked it the day before since dal is always better on day two when the spices have infused the lentils) and reheat it in the microwave when everything else was ready to serve, or to do the rice in the oven. The oven won because I hate microwaves.
I suppose I could have left the dal in the oven in an oven-proof bowl or dish too, but once I got the idea of baking the rice in my head I couldn’t get it out. I was also interested to see if it would be easier than doing it on the stove, since I usually mess that up anyway and end up burning the rice. I also have this handy cast-iron skillet, and when I can start something on the stove and transfer it to the oven I feel like a pro and I get this excited feeling inside, like a diabetic kid in a sugar-free candy shop. Well, I feel like a pro until I burn myself and swear and put turmeric on the burn because it’s antiseptic and anti-inflammatory, but a week later I still have a scar on my left hand…and it’s orange. That doesn’t happen every time…at least not the orange part.
Madhur Jaffrey has a million rice recipes in her book, but none for baked basmati. Fortunately I’ve been reading Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (a stunningly beautiful Indian cookbook/travelogue). So I combined a few recipes from that book with some brown basmati stove-top instructions from Madhur Jaffrey and guessed a little and I think it worked out okay. I mean, I wouldn’t be scooped up by any Indian mothers looking for a suitable rice-making daughter for their eligible bachelor of a son or anything, but that was never my goal. Well, it’d be something to add to my resumé:
“Career-Related Experience:
Highly-sought after rice-making potential wife; not Hindi, but not hopeless.”
So all I did, ingenious little potential home-maker that I am, was put 2 cups of rice and 3 times as much water (about 6 cups) in a large bowl to soak because that’s what you do with basmati to keep the grains separate: 
I left it for an hour or so and then rinsed it off. Then I put the rice in my large cast-iron skillet with twice as much water (normally you need 2.25 times as much water as rice for brown rice, but because it’s soaked, equal parts should be fine. For some reason it wasn’t quite enough, though. Maybe too much boiled off in the next step. So when you make it next, err on the side of adding too much water instead of too little – maybe 2.5 times the amount of rice).
Then I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Celcius. You need your oven ready in advance or your rice will take much longer to bake.
I brought the skillet to a boil on the stove and then covered it with aluminum foil (shiny side down) and stuck it in the preheated oven. I figured it would take about 40-45 minutes. I checked it after 35 and it was getting a bit sticky so I changed my plan a little. I decided to add a little more boiling water right away since the grains weren’t cooked yet and there wasn’t much water left to be absorbed. If you do this make sure the water you add is boiling or it’ll slow-down the cooking process and probably wreck your rice more than you already have…Then I let it cook the remaining 10 minutes. I decided to not check it again, but instead to turn off the oven and to just leave the skillet inside with the door slightly ajar to let the heat out of the oven but to allow the rice to continue to steam. This is kind of like what Jaffrey says to do in a lot of her stove-top rice recipes – leave the rice to sit for 10 minutes when it’s not quite done yet. That way it doesn’t burn while it finishes absorbing the last of the water. The inside of the pot is hot enough to finish cooking the rice before losing its heat.
When you’re ready to serve just fluff with a fork. One less thing to knock over on the stove-top.
Well, I guess I’m not marriage material after all. Better keep messing up rice to make sure I stay that way…
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