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You would think I would have learned long ago that it’s not nice to be smug, but no, it seems I still need gentle reminders.  Once upon a time I was killing some time in the Village shopping at Balducci’s, once the greatest food store in New York, only to suffer a precipitous decline in quality and variety after the Balducci family sold the store to a Maryland-based specialty food conglomerate that made a hash of the business before closing it down abruptly with no warning to the employees.  One day, not long before closing, I was browsing at Balducci’s when I came across a tightly-wrapped, fat little bundle of snowy, matte white rice.  ”Kalijira,” read the label.  “Grown in Bangladesh.  $5.99/pound.” I’d like to think that I didn’t actually snort out loud, but there was a snort.  Foolish Manhattanites!  $6.99 a pound for Kalijira, the same Kalijira I bought in the new Indian grocery on 31st Street just off 30th Avenue in Astoria.  Mine came in a cream-colored cotton sack with a bright red painting of an elephant on the front, $11.00 for 8 pounds.  “Oh,” said the beautiful young woman at the register, “this is very nice rice. Have you ever cooked with it?” She told me to look for and pick out any stray little pebbles, to rinse the rice well and let it drain, to melt some butter and fry the rice a bit before adding boiling water to it.  The resulting rice, though short and stubby in appearance, behaves like a perfect, fluffy dry long-grain rice.  It is wonderful in pilaf.  I have heard it called “baby basmati,” but to call it such understates its charms.  It is not as fragrant as basmati, but it has a scent all its own, enhanced by toasting it in butter, and a taste that manages to be both subtle and deep.  It is worth paying $6.00 a pound for it, but I’m still glad I don’t have to.

Unfortunately, I have run smack-dab into Newton’s Law of Smartassedness, which states that an act of braggery must have its equal and opposite smackdown, which brings me to bamboo rice.  Last Saturday found me at Kalustyan’s, the place where I buy my Christmas fruitcake fruit, my fresh curry leaves and any beans and/or rice that I can’t find in my own neighborhood.  Because I am a fool for blackeyed pea hummus and hoppin’ John, I find myself going through a lot of blackeyed peas, and I found a four-pound bag at Kalustyan’s, a steal at twice the price.  You have to love a store that sells six different varieties of red rice—at least I do—and within minutes I found myself clutching bags of Wehani rice, Christmas lima beans, dried flageolets, rice beans, brown basmati rice, beluga lentils and this deeply green-hued, spicy-scented rice.  Once I got home and was able to consult with our space-age friend the Internet, I learned that bamboo rice was actually a short-grain white rice infused with bamboo chlorophyll during the milling process.  The instructions on the packet were a bit vague, so I decided to try my old standby of twice the volume of water to rice and see if it worked.  I rinsed a cup of rice in a strainer, to rid it of excess starch, and left it in the strainer to drain.  I brought two cups of water to the boil, threw in a little salt, added the rice, brought the water back to the boil, covered it, lowered the heat, and went to do something else for 10 minutes.  When I checked the rice, the water had all been absorbed, and steam was beginning to form pockmarked tunnels in the mass of rice, the formation that always reminds me of pictures from the moon.  I turned off the heat, recovered the rice and let it sit for five minutes.

The resulting rice was so rich that I wondered if I had maybe thrown in some butter and then completely forgotten about it.  Each grain had a sheen to it.  The intense all-over green of the rice in its raw state was gone; in its place were tiny little green flecks.  The flavor had a hint of tea about it, but not overwhelmingly so; instead, it seemed to emphasize the flavor of the rice itself, buttery, savory, earthy; it made the rice ricier, much in the way that the right orange muscat wine will enhance the taste of chocolate.  If I did not have plans for this rice, to say nothing of a nice young man with whom I’d already promised I’d share it, it would have been perfectly easy for me to cradle the pot in my arms—after putting on my big giant oven gloves, of course—and eat it all in situ.  However, I did have a plan for it, namely to combine it with a warm lentil salad that I learned to make in a spa cuisine class once upon a time.  I can’t remember who originally created the lentil recipe—Amy Cotler?  Seppi Rengli?—but I have to find out so I can give him/her proper credit, because I have eaten hundreds, if not thousands, of bowls of these lentils.  (I am trying not to turn into Neil from The Young Ones, but...ah, hell..."Lentils are really great.  No matter how many times you eat them, they never get boring.") These lentils are indeed really great, they never get boring, and they’re a doddle to prepare.  You take a cup of small lentils of your choice, either green Puy lentils (from France), brown Castelluccio lentils (from Italy) or beluga lentils (see the link above) and cook them until they are tender.  If all of the cooking liquid has not been absorbed, drain the lentils.  While they are still hot, dress them with a dressing made of olive oil, water or chicken stock, Dijon mustard, vinegar of your choice (I like sherry), salt and pepper.  About half a cup of dressing will suffice for saucing the lentils, but I’ll admit, I don’t measure anything; I just eyeball more-or-less equal quantities of everything.  If I’m watching my fat intake, I’ll scale back on the olive oil and increase the amount of stock.  You can add lemon juice if you’d like, although I think that the vinegar and mustard make this tart enough.  You can mince a shallot and add it to the dressing; you can crack a garlic clove and embed it in the lentils, and then remove it before serving it, if you are feeding someone who can’t or won’t eat it.  You can top it with some diced tomato, or some crumbled soft cheese like ricotta salata or manouri, or not.

As I tucked into my bowl that night, thinking of how proud my mom would be that I absorbed all her lessons about beans and rice combining to make a complete protein, I thought, “I want to eat this all the time.” Then I remembered that that bamboo rice set me back $10.00 for a pound of it, and it would not be coming to the local Indian market any time soon.  This is what I get for poking fun of my fellow Balducci’s shoppers, who, after all, weren’t paying $10.00/pound for their rice.  Foolish Bakerina!  $10.00/pound for rice?  Ah, well.  I guess I’ll just have to fall back on that jewel of the neighborhood, the big bag of Kalijira, or maybe make the leap to whole-grain once and for all and cook up a pot of Wehani rice.  Or...or...or I could just recognize a good thing when I see it, reflect ruefully on how and why I developed all these expensive tastes (sauternes, smoked sable, bamboo rice), suddenly remember that next door to Kalustyan’s is Curry in a Hurry, where I can buy myself a freshly-made aloo paratha, the potato-stuffed flatbread that makes the best cheap lunch in town, and then buy a bag or two of bamboo rice with the money I’m saving.