White rice with carrots

An anti-diarrhoea recipe

Hello again everyone!

Today I’m here with a recipe with a different purpose.

You see, my best friend has just become ill with diarrhoea and, as you’ll already know, when you have diarrhoea you must eat certain things in order to not damage your stomach, nor to have to go to the bathroom to release it all like water.

So I decided to make her some food for the diet she had to follow, white rice with carrots.

I know it sounds simple, but I’d never been able to cook rice well before, sometimes it would overcook and end up very soft as if it were a purée, or if not it would stay really hard as if it were a rock.

A problem that I have is that whenever I change city or country, I end up with diarrhoea or gastroenteritis. I suppose it’s because the water and the food are processed in a different way to what I’m used to and I end up feeling poorly.

As the years have passed I’ve been learning, and now every time I travel, when I want to drink some water, it has to be nothing but bottled water. I never trust tap water anymore, because in some regions of Spain or other countries, the water has more limescale than that of Madrid which makes me feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.

No kidding, in Madrid we have the best water in Spain. Or even, depending on the bottle, the tap water in Madrid sometimes is much better.

And here is the problem. Since I’m used to the water in Madrid, if I go to another city or country where the water components vary a lot (above all if there is more limescale), I end up being sick. The worst of all is that people usually use tap water when cooking and to wash fruit and vegetables, etc. So you can imagine the money I spend on bottled water every time I travel. But money is nothing compared to being in good health and not being sick all day.

Basically, I’d never really learned to cook rice before because each time that I travelled I was with my parents, so it was them who cooked for me whilst I stayed in bed complaining about how much my stomach hurt. But in the last few years I’ve found myself having to learn because I’ve started to travel alone and sometimes I’ve forgotten to drink bottled water.

So you’ll see, the fact that I learned to cook rice owes itself to me being on Erasmus in France (I’ll leave the link here to My Erasmus Experience in Amiens, for those who haven’t read it yet). In one of the meals that we made with the Erasmus family, apparently I ate something that didn’t agree with me, and when I got home I started to feel ill.

At first I thought it was because it was very cold outside and I hadn’t wrapped up well enough, so I decided to make myself a hot cup of tea and to quickly get into bed.

But at around 2 o’clock in the morning, I got up because I really needed to go to the bathroom and well, when I went, everything I had eaten that night came out pretty much like water. Well, I’ll leave out the ‘basically’ because it was literally water. I don’t want to add more details to the subject because I think you all know what it’s like to have diarrhoea.

So, after spending about 15 minutes in the bathroom, I dragged myself back to my bedroom and measured my temperature and saw that I had a fever. How wounding, fever and diarrhoea, the worst of the worst.

Sometimes diarrhoea is accompanied by fever and headaches, and sometimes just by stomach pains. For me, as always, I get the worst of it.

As soon as I got back from the bathroom I knew I was suffering with diarrhoea, and I knew that from then on I’d have to be careful with what I ate or I would end up going to the bathroom all of the time. And so, I remembered that in the school canteen, when somebody had diarrhoea, they usually prepared them white rice with chicken or slices of smoked turkey.

Unfortunately, all that I had was the rice and a few vegetables. What’s more is that the rice was still sealed since I’d bought it, which will have been a couple of weeks before that night; and all because I had no idea how to cook it, but I wanted to learn. So voilà, the perfect opportunity.

I set about searching the internet, as I always do, for recipes to get rid of diarrhoea and I found the recipe for white rice with carrots. So I got to work.

First I’ll give you the ingredients and then I’ll tell you the quantities that you’ll need, because for the rice and the water the quantity of rice has to be proportional.

I’ll explain:

Ingredients:

• White rice (don’t use brown because this will make you go to the bathroom even more).
• Carrots.
• Onion.

Method:

Firstly, peel the carrots and onions and slice them into slices.

It’s better to cut the onion into big slices because it’s not for eating, but for giving flavour to the rice; unless you want to eat it later, but for me it’s one of the vegetables that I like the least, so I decided to cut i tinto big slices in order to be able to remove them once the rice was cooked.

For the carrots, you can use as much as you want. As with onions, it’s not a vegetable that I love, so I took one and a half carrots and cut them into thin circles so that they cooked better in the water along with the rice.

It’s better to finely chop the carrots so that they cook better, because if you leave them too large they’ll stay hard and will be difficult to eat afterwards.

Once you’ve chopped the onion and carrots, take a deep frying pan or even a medium saucepan and add a little bit of olive oil so that the rice doesn’t stick to the pan.

If you don’t want to add the oil because you don’t like the flavour that it gives to the rice, it doesn’t matter, but I strongly recommend it because if the rice overcooks it will be difficult to separate it from the pan.

Turn on the heat to médium-high, and then take an average-sized glass, like one that you’d use for juice. Don’t worry if you don’t have a glass this size. Take any other glass, but remember to respect the measurements.

Next, fill the entire glass with rice and add it to the pan. Then fill the glass with water and add this to the pan, and now refill the entire glass with water and add it to the pan.

So remember this well because it’s the most important part. For each glass of rice, add two glasses of water.

Normally, I use two glasses of rice and four glasses of water. The amount of rice you’ll be left with will be enough for two meals. I say this because I’m someone who is a bit lazy when it comes to cooking so if I’m going to cook, I prefer to make enough to have that evening or the following day too. So this time it wasn’t going to be any less.

Once you’ve added the rice and the water, add the sliced carrots and onion to the pan. Then a little bit of salt to give it a bit of flavour and avoid it being bland.

Now let’s move onto the cooking time for the rice.

Leave the pan on a medium-high heat, more towards high. Here I’m referring to, for example, the glass-ceramic hob that I had in my residence, which had temperature markers from 0 to 12. So to cook rice I set it to number 10.

Leave it for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile however there’s no time for a nap; you’ll need to keep an eye on the temperature in case it’s too high, and also stir the rice from time to time so that it doesn’t stick. So during this 15 minutes, stir the rice with the carrots and onion more or less every 5 minutes.

Then, when you see the rice starting to absorb the water and there seems to be holes that appear like bubbles, reduce the heat (I set it to number 5) and cover the pan.

Leave it for another 5-10 minutes, not forgetting to stir it now and again.

When the time is up, remove the lid. Stir it and try a grain of rice.

Personally, I like it al dente, which is neither hard nor soft, let’s make it edible. If it’s soft it goes very thick and if it’s hard it’s not very appealing to eat. So the best is too cook it al dente.

If you notice that it’s still hard, increase the heat a little and leave it for a couple more minutes. But if it’s already too soft, remove the pan from the heat, tip the rice into a strainer and run it under cold water so that it stops cooking. So at least you’ll avoid it cooking even more and becoming even softer.

The carrots will definitely still be a little hard, but this doesn’t mean they’re raw, just that they still have all of their nutrients.

This is something that not many people know, but vegetables need to be hard, because if they go soft, all of the nutrients that they have evaporate or end up in the water and end up becoming pieces of cork with no nutrients. The nutrients will have stayed in the water, so it’s better to drink the water or the stock than to eat the vegetables.

Nor do they have to stay super hard, but let’s say something like crunchy.

Afterwards, serve the rice on the plate and it’s done!

A fruit that really helps with diarrhoea is apples. But watch out, you need to eat them without the skin as the skin will worsen diarrhoea. So peel and slice them so that they’re easier to eat.

For my friend I put it all on the plate because if not, she won’t eat it, and really it’s better this way as you can eat the apples with the rice. There’s a peculiar flavour when you mix sweet and savoury.

Another thing: My friend added some honey to the rice, and the flavour really surprised me because it was quite good. And honey has lots of healing properties, so even better.

If you’re experiencing diarrhoea, I wish you all the best and I hope that it goes away soon. If not, here you have a recipe for if ever you suffer from diarrhoea.

In the future I’ll write another recipe for gastroenteritis, as it’s never a bad thing to know what to eat in these situations.

So, that’s all for today.

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