I asked for a rice cooker for Christmas, and my parents got me one. Well, sort of. It was listed as Gremlin’s present, but I was the one who asked for it.

I like rice, I just don’t like making it. And the easy-to-cook rice costs so much more than regular rice. Regular rice is, what, fifty cents a pound or something? Something ridiculously cheap. Especially if you buy twenty pounds at once.

Which causes a problem: what the hell do you do with twenty pounds of rice, if you’re not cooking for five hundred people at once?

Obviously, you store it. But how?

Initially, I stored some in this OXO brand container [I’m not sure what they’re called, I just know they’re made by OXO, and they have this nifty button in the middle of the lid, so they’re easy to open, which is important to me] that was intended for spaghetti [or whatever long-type pasta, but probably spaghetti, because where the fuck do you find packages containing more than one pound of fettuccine?], which was not at all ideal. The scoop that came with the rice cooker [intended to measure a cup of rice, which is apparently different than, say, a cup of sugar] would not fit into the pasta container.

I happened to see another OXO container on the Really Good Sale shelf at Target. And this one actually had rice all over the label. Score!

But it did not hold much rice. I had a twenty pound bag, and this container would probably hold, like, one of the smaller bags. I don’t really know how much, but not twenty pounds. Not at all.

I used a bag clip from Ikea to seal the bag, and began researching rice storage.

Apparently, this is a very real concern. A concern which has resulted in the invention of rice storage systems that also dispense a cup of rice at a time.

Neat!

And they generally hold twenty or more pounds of rice!

Fucking awesome!

And they cost fifty dollars or more.

Boo.

Obviously, this amazing piece of storage technology will have to wait. Perhaps, when I am finally able to get one, Ikea will have made one with an unpronounceable name. I can put it on my list with the adorable fat, round little Spoka light.

Then we went to H Mart. And what do I see, first thing, when I enter the store? Non-grocery items! What? This is totally unexpected!

Not only do they have chopsticks and rice cookers, but they have this mysterious box that is clearly a rice store-and-dispense-o-matic!

And the only thing printed in English on the box? The words ‘Rice Tub’. Well, there’s also a URL on the back, but I couldn’t see that. All I could see was the thing I wanted. Right there on the shelf.

And for less than I could find it online [with free shipping, anyway, and I honestly did not look very hard].

Look at that majestic thing.

Okay, I lied. There were also numbers in English. Confusing numbers. Like ’12kg’. What the fuck does that even mean?

I asked Gremlin.

“Obviously not the weight of the box.”

I assumed that it was quite a lot when translated into pounds. I also assumed that it was the storage capacity. Perhaps even twenty pounds. I asked if it was over twenty pounds.

It was.

I bought it. Because I am impulsive and stupid, and I had over ten pounds of rice in a bag, and that bag was within the reach of a freshly rambunctious kitty. And that just seemed like a recipe for ‘picking dry rice out of things for the next century’.

I hoped that, when I got it home, I would be able to figure out how to work it. Because, based on the box? There would not be assembly instructions in English inside.

It turned out that there weren’t any instructions inside at all. They were all on the back. And I didn’t really need them, because it was all very logical and clear. Bottom, measuring mechanism, shield, top, rice in, press the push-down thing to test, see how it does compared to the scoop, hooray!

It now takes up a hell of a lot of counter space right next to my rather large rice cooker.

Because I’m paranoid, I applied Press and Seal to the bottom, and over the top under the lid, just to be absolutely sure that no horrible little bugs can infest my rice.

I look forward to dispensing many meals worth of rice, and to eventually refilling it and not having to worry about ‘what the hell do I do with a twenty pound bag of rice?’

Because, obviously, I put it in my Rice Tub.