Right This Way To Rice!

Have you ever struggled to come up with ways to incorporate grains and carbohydrates into your meals? As a new adult, I sure have! So today I will be taking you along my journey of learning how to make rice.

My family ate rice every week growing up and until this week, I have never made it myself. I went to my hometown for a weekend to visit my new niece and my parents were serving rice once again. After finding out it takes very little time and very minimal effort, I bought a rice cooker, some rice, and chicken broth as quickly as I could!

Normally I would facetime and ask my mom how to cook something that I learnt from them, but I told her not to tell me so I could search the internet for this class haha. I decided to use a source that I haven't used thus far in my cooking journey but have used for countless other searches: wikiHow.

Despite what it sounds like, wikiHow is a publication website NOT affiliated with Wikipedia. It is, however, a website with thousands and thousands of tutorial articles that all come with step-by-step pictures, videos, or more famously, drawings in a very recognizable art style. They also have added a "quizzes" tab with countless quizzes you can take! One that caught my eye as someone on a cooking journey was "What's the Best meal Kit for Me?".

When searching for an article about cooking rice, all I had to do was type "how to cook rice in a rice cooker?" in the search bar and BOOM- dozens of articles popped up. I clicked on the first one I seen and decided that based on the plenty of helpful images and enjoyable length, this was simple enough for me.

I used White Jasmine Rice and replaced water with chicken broth for more flavour. If you find white rice too plain, I highly recommend! I also learned from the article that you are supposed to wash your rice due to pesticides so I appreciated the videos that showed how to do so within the article.

I really like wikiHow because I find the step-by-step pictures and tips really easy to follow along and learn. It appears that you can tell if a post is fairly reliable or not by the ratings, comments, or the little box that says "Approved!" or not. The posts clearly state when they were last updated, who they were written by and their qualifications, the authors resources and references, and what percentage of voters found the article helpful. If you are a visual learner and enjoy when things are organized in a simple and easy to follow way, then you might enjoy using wikiHow for certain things.

Would I use it as a place to get information around medical advice, politics, therapy, or facts in general? Not at all. As with most places on the internet and for what is essentially a formal blogging website, you shouldn't use it to make medical important decisions or conclusions without talking to a professional. I think that because the people writing these articles want you to click on theirs, some of the titles can be "click-baity" or are perhaps questionable articles such as "how to save your marriage" or "how to drive". I advise people to use digital literacy skills when navigating the website, and to use it for things such as "how to cook rice", "how to clean a litter box", or "how to trim a monstera deliciosa plant". I don't think I would advise my students to use wikiHow because it's not up to my discretion to decide whether or not my students would be able to recognize when some of the articles are really strange or could lead to someone getting hurt. It could be used to help teach students digital literacy though I suppose if you had it approved by administration and used it effectively.