How to Make Dinner At Your New Apartment When The Gas Doesn’t Get Set Up Until Tomorrow

Subtitle: And you have a gas stove, no microwave, no toaster oven, etc.

But you have a rice cooker!, your boyfriend points out. And grains, all sorts of grains—I had stocked them up before the move as if Indiana were Timbuktu, as if headed to a bomb shelter perchance to live out a nuclear winter, as if … well, you get the point: I had a lot of grains. And grain-like products, too. Canned goods, however, I had two: One can of cannellini beans, transplanted from my last apartment, and one can of organic diced tomatoes, which I’d bought at a Kroger’s in Cincinnati two nights before, thinking: ‘Well, this is precisely the kind of thing one would keep stocked in one’s cupboard if one was Good at Life.’

So I scanned the cupboard shelves—past the brown rice, basmati, bulgur and steel-cut oats; past the zero-calorie seaweed pasta, couscous (regular and whole wheat), amaranth (enough to feed an army; an Amazon Subscribe-&-Save mistake of yore, because despite it’s ‘superfood’ status, amaranth is really kind of mushy and gross), flax-seed and pasta shells and cornmeal—until my eye rested on: Orzo. Whole-wheat orzo. For reasons I can’t quite explain, this seemed the obvious choice.

I cooked the orzo in the rice cooker, improvising on water because the instructions were in quarts and I’ve never been any good at conversions. When it was finished cooking, I stirred in the can of tomatoes and the can of beans, leaving the rice cooker set to warm, and threw in some crushed red pepper, ground basil, oregano, black pepper and grated parmesan cheese, one of the few fridge items I’d transported in a mini-cooler, along with arugula. I put the arugula on the plates with a little grapeseed oil (because I didn’t have olive oil) and piled the orzo mix on top. And here we go! Not bad, eh?