Sticky Rice and Sausage

My kids' mom is Laotian. One of the things she introduced me to is sticky rice. It's not the rice we Americans are used to. It's meant to stick together. 

Even within Asian cultures, stick rice is used differently. The Laotians and Vietnamese use it as part of the meal. If you eat pho, for example, you can ball up sticky rice and dip it in the broth. You can dip balls of sticky rice in soy sauce. You can use it to wrap around meat and veggies. 

The Chinese and Japanese tend to use sticky rice for desserts. 

Stick rice goes by a few different names: glutinous rice and sweet rice. Here's one example:

My kids love to wrap sticky rice around sausages. So, here's how to make it. 

The rice needs to be washed first. Run water through it until the water is clear. Then you need to soak the rice in water.  Best to soak it several hours. But I've been able to cook it right after an hour of soaking. 

Now, my kids' mom uses this contraption to cook the rice:

It consists of a pot of water and a bamboo basket. The idea is to boil water and let the rice soak up the steam. It's not like white rice where you put the rice in the boiling water. For sticky rice you want the rice above the boiling water.  She taught me to cap the bamboo basket with a plate to keep the steam in. You can get a contraption like this, as well as the sticky rice itself, at an Asian supermarket. 

The rice should cook for at least half an hour. Sometimes it takes longer. After half an hour, you monitor the rice until you see that it sticks together. 

Now, the easy part is the sasauge. Our favorites are the Johnsonville breakfast sausages. We usually get either the maple syrup or brown sugar sausage. Brown the sausage. 

We have bamboo containers to put the rice in. You can get them also at an Asian supermarket. 

Serve the rice and sausage together. Wrap the sausage in the rice. If you like, dip in soy sauce. Then enjoy.