The sun is finally coming out.....! Ok, so we had snow yesterday...but today (at least the earlier part) is beautiful. This is the kind of day that re-affirms the notion that Spring will indeed arrive. I do find that Winter in Glasgow is a bit tough for me having grown up somewhere where there is rather more daylight (and sun!) during the Winter. This lack of daylight makes my personal circadian rhythms go haywire and I'm not much use for anything throughout most of January.
One of the consequences of this is that our diet goes out the window - and I don't even mean our good intentions or our January plans to revamp our lives here, but rather our descent into lazy cooking and processed food (which of course as we all know makes things worse!). If it takes longer than 10 minutes to either cook or to toss into the slow cooker, I can't manage it. I've eaten lots of microwaved plates of refried beans with rice, salsa and guacamole, scrambled eggs and rice, refrigerator surprise fried rice, etc. You get the picture - it only takes a minute to get a big batch of rice into the rice cooker - and I can take a nap knowing that it will click over to the 'keep warm' setting until I am ready. What would we have been eating if it weren't for the rice cooker? I dread to think....
As appliances go, the rice cooker is probably the one that I would be most unhappy to live without. Sure, I can manage the absorption method - which makes perfectly nice rice - but it's never as perfect or as easy as the rice cooker. And I don't really like the boil and strain menthod as the texture always seems wrong to me. There's also not very much like that first moment when you open the rice cooker after it's finished and you get that blast of freshly cooked rice smell - the very smell of comfort and warmth. It doesn't matter if it's white, brown or wild (as long as the liquid measurement is right) or even if it's another grain such as quinoa, millet or buckwheat, it's easy and it's always right. I've even made risotto in the rice cooker with a fair amount of success.
There are many different kinds of rice cooker on the market these days. Some are multi-use appliance that may double as slow cookers, steamers or even pressure cookers. Some are very simple with nothing save a button that toggles from 'on' to 'warm' to 'off' - and some operate using something called 'fuzzy logic' and have lots of buttons on the front. Mine is somewhere in the middle - no inserts for steaming or other secondary uses but has fuzzy logic (which if I understand it, seems to enhance the machine's ability to decide when the rice is done with more accuracy) and just the right amount of buttons to be understandable on the front.
If you have a rice cooker and haven't fallen in love with it yet, check out Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann's book 'The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook'. I have a lot of cookbooks, too many for most of them to live in the kitchen in fact - but this one does. I pop it open several times a week.
Do you have an appliance that you would hate to live without?
No comments:
Post a Comment