I recently decided to switch up my bedtime routine, by which I mean turning off the psychological thrillers on Netflix that kept me up until 1:10 am and switching to reading. I'll fall asleep faster, I thought. I won't have nightmares of Penn Badgley injecting me with a bouquet of poisonous herbs, I thought. I'll wake up inspired to write more and, God forbid, better.
But as I made my way through Ruth Reichl's "Garlic and Sapphires" (a long overdue read for this food writer), she mentioned a cooking hack that ultimately did keep me up for hours: "[If] you're buying any quantity of Arborio or carnaroli rice, keep it in the refrigerator. It goes bad faster than you would think," she wrote in the headnote for Risotto Primavera, her adaptation of Le Cirque's unexpectedly fantastic recipe.
