C'mon, Jennie, where's yer sense of humour! :-)

Horses for courses with rice. Pudding rice, generally short-grain, is a totally different beast from basmati, the only long-grain rice I use. Like risotto rice or paella rice, pudding rice is meant to shed its lovely gooey creaminess during cooking, whereas you want basmati to be nice and fluffy without being sticky. I don't see it as one or the other and I devour all of 'em with relish, sweet and savoury. You just have to cook 'em right, that's all. No chalk in the risotto, no goo in the curry, no hard granules in the rice pud. I've been served up plenty of badly-cooked rice in my time and I suspect that bad cookery has persuaded many people that they don't like rice in one form or another. A bit like Brussels sprouts...