How To Make a Plant Based Teflon

I have discovered that rice cooked at a high enough temperature and for long enough creates a plant based Teflon coating on any stainless steel saucepan!

Now I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet but I am quite a good cook you know. However being a menopausal mum I do have the attention span of a gnat. For example, cooking Pip’s fishfingers, the first 3 minutes I’m attentive but nothing has happened and so I multitask and find myself emptying the school bag and sorting out the washing. A flash of panic startles my brain, ‘Oh no the fishfingers!’ Uh oh, I’ve burnt them! Oh well, I’ll turn them over and try again. 2 minutes in and Pip is asking me, ‘Mum, come and have a look at this’ so off I go and the fishfingers are now burnt on the other side aswell. On the rare occasion that I don’t burn the fish fingers they actually look undercooked to me!

One particular occasion whilst cooking supper as a menopausal mother gnat, I popped the rice on to boil and then promptly went off to my studio to teach an evening session of Pilates.

We did our usual balance and warm up routine (the rice has now boiled dry) and then down onto the mat for our workout. Meanwhile cue the burning of the rice. It has a strong distinctive smell yet it took some time to waft from the kitchen, through the sitting room, across the hall way and up the stairs into the studio. As we lay there taking deep relaxing breaths together the smell suddenly jolted my memory. I leapt into action, quickly telling my clients to ‘Carry on I won’t be long.’

The smoke was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, thick dark smoke, the smell catching at the back of my nose. As I raced into the kitchen wondering what I was going to be faced with I was mightily relieved that the kitchen wasn’t on fire. I was also mightily surprised that Pip hadn’t even noticed the smoke filling the sitting room from floor to ceiling as he sat there watching the tele!