Back on Monday

As always, when I have the day off, so does my blog. See you Monday.

What Is a Rice Ball?

Rice ball, split in half and quartered

Enter a pizza-by-the-slice place in New York City -- which is about 90 percent of all pizza joints here -- and you'll be offered a wide selection of pre-made pizzas, all ready to be reheated. You can choose a classic slice like marinara, or maybe something you can't find back home, like lasagna pizza. What the heck, make it one of each.

They'll also have your basic mozzarella sticks and, more than likely, a softball-sized breaded hunk of ... something.

That's a rice ball.

A rice ball is basically a large ball of rice laced with tomato sauce and cheese and stuffed with ground beef and a few peas. It's coated and fried and, when ordered, reheated in a giant pizza oven.

It's bland, not spicy at all. In fact, it could do with a few red pepper flakes. It's also not very crunchy, although I suspect the homemade versions probably are. You can't taste the peas at all -- they must be there only for color.

What rice balls lack in delectability they make up for in availability. You can't stumble into a pizza place around here without tripping over a tray of rice balls. And even though they aren't that great, Paul and I continue to recommend them to visitors. They're not bad, after all, and they're just so different. But if you're looking for different and delicious, skip the rice ball and go for another slice of lasagna pizza. Yum.

Reading "The Hunger Games"

I started "The Hunger Games" on Thursday, just a few hours before the movie opened at midnight. The timing was accidental, kind of. The book was published in 2008, but it was only recently that I got sick and tired of hearing references to the books that I couldn't understand. So I finally reserved the book at the library, and a couple of weeks later it finally arrived at the Fort Hamilton branch. I picked it up after work Thursday.

I finished it Saturday morning. Now I have two regrets: (1) that I waited so long to read it in the first place and (2) that I hesitated to reserve the second and third books in the trilogy before I had received the first. As I write this Sunday evening, I'm 290 on the list for "Catching Fire" and 303 for "Mockingjay." Luckily the library has more than a hundred copies of each, so it shouldn't be too long before I receive them.

I'm proud of the variety of books I read, so I'm not ashamed to admit that I like a good Young Adult book now and again. In fact, I just read "Ender's Game" -- another YA dystopian book -- earlier this month, and I wasn't introduced to Harry Potter until college. It also makes me wonder: When did YA as a genre begin? Would at least some of the books and authors we consider classics today (such as my own favorite, Jane Austen) have been in the "young adult" category, had it existed 200 years ago?

My newfound fondness of "The Hunger Games" is also yet another lesson that I should pay more attention to new, popular books. It's a lesson that started with Harry Potter, when I read the first book some two or three years after it was published, and continued with Stieg Larsson's Millennium series (I read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" last year, three years after its English publication, and "The Girl Who Played with Fire" in January. Only the third book in the trilogy to go!) Obviously it's a lesson I need to learn over and over again.