In Korea, we say expressions like Cooking rice, Rice is done, No worries about rice, etc. We say those expressions as many times as we eat rice. In Korean, 밥(pronounced like /Bob/) means both rice and meal. So, cooking rice means cooking a meal. Rice is done means The meal is ready. No worries about rice means No worries about hunger. As many times as we eat rice means A LOT.

To Korean, 밥(rice) is important enough to mean a whole meal. We always eat rice no matter how we eat it: mixing(Bibim) it with others, stir-frying it, steam it, or putting it in a soup.

Rice is a center of Korean cuisine. We always have rice on the meal table. We add to it a soup and a couple of side dishes which are savory. We often cook rice with various crops and add soup or side dishes that go well with the rice. Sometimes, we eat only rice with some sauce without anything. So, there can be no soup and no side dish, but there must be rice.

If you just started cooking Korean food, it's a good idea to focus on rice. You can cook many different types of rice and eat it with some sauce. Then you don't need to worry about cooking soup or side dishes, and it's still a good meal. Without an electric rice cooker, you can cook a delicious pot of rice. Each tool has its own charm, but when you cook rice in a pot, it's easy to add something in the middle, and you also get brown rice (burnt rice on the bottom), which is called Nurungji. You can add anything to the rice, especially something in season that will bring you the seasonal flavor and color.

I get curious about inside once I smell the rice being cooked in the steam not long after putting the pot on the heat. After waiting until done, I open the lid of the pot. The steam and the smell are warm. The seasonal crops I randomly put are sitting on top of the softly cooked rice.

I partially mix the rice with some sauce. Eating it, I again think about rice. What is going to be next rice?