I've always found white rice shockingly unpredictable.
Sometimes it'll just kick in there as fast as lucozade, other times it'll hang in the background and pile in later like the classic pizza effect.
Often, the difference depends on what you eat it with. If the accompanying sauce has a lot of fat in it, that'll delay it, so you'll end up with that little surprise in the early hours.
I quite like a Thai green curry every now and then. Different restaurants have different takes on the fat content of the sauce - some are notably creamy, which'll slow absorption down, others are more like a lean broth, so that'll be faster.
So, some accomodations need to be made in terms of figuring out how slow/how fast is this one likely to be.
As long as they've all got a decent amount of that liquoricey Thai sweet basil in them, I'll put up with the uncertainty!
I've never understood white rice. You start off with brown rice - there's vitamins, minerals, fibre in the coating, then they rip all that off to make white rice. Culturally, I think they think it makes it more "sophisticated", even though they've ripped the good bits out.
I eat modest amounts of brown rice. Compared to white rice, it can be remarkably stabilising for long periods. That's probably because of the fibre.
Beans/pulses work out quite well for me too - a slow manageable burn.
I really wish more restaurants would offer brown rice. The sandwich place next door to my office does it as part of their multi-choice salad bowls - bit of brown rice, prawns or coronation chicken and/or feta salad, peas, beans etc etc, and I'm good to go!
PS: don't get me started on buckwheat!
