Enter the rice cooker

Took the plunge into a sea of automatic rice cookers today with this Black & Decker 6-cup rice cooker, almost the smallest you can get (there’s a 3-cup, too), only $20 (on sale for 15!). It comes with a steamer basket, so you can steam veggies as well. And you can use it for things like soup, and reheating.

There’s a whole little universe of cool cookery devices, and they’re surprisingly inexpensive. Once you get rid of the idea of a central STOVE, a typical multiburner-plus-oven set-up, as a compulsory bit of living gear, things get interesting! There are all sorts of tabletop ovens, slow cookers, grills and griddles, electric woks, blenders and food processors. I’m sure there’s more.

As soon as I started focussing on these little devices as a primary means of cooking, the way I looked at food automatically changed. Thoughts naturally turned to individual ingredients, cooking methods, nutritional value, diet. You don’t want, don’t have space for, a whole clutter of equipment and things to wash up, and this thinking naturally extends to food itself. And you can only fit so much into a tiny fridge.

This is pretty exciting. Then again, maybe they ARE all just overspecialized gadgets, and I’ll end up embracing a simple pan or wok and a burner. It’s an experiment. More on my first rice cooker after I’ve actually used it for a while!