Fine, I admit it

Having a rice cooker has sort of changed my life. I bought it off of a friend who was moving. Initially I had my doubts, especially buying one using "fuzzy logic" because as I'm sure was the case in most Asian households growing up, you had some ancient thing with a 2 pole switch that somehow made rice, puddings, steamed vegetables, and whatever else. You could trick those things. Fuzzy logic (whether or not this term is correctly applied) rice cookers are a whole different animal. You have to tell it what you're making (some of them even have cake modes...which my friend and I tried and hey, it looked enough like cake! Imagine if we made it mixing with a whisk and not a fork and also when sober!) and then it'll magically cook it juuuuust right.

And I've been living without a rice cooker for years, being the bad Asian that I am. (Along with not playing the piano or violin.) I just make rice in a pot. What is so hard???

But hey, you help a friend out by buying his junk and you get junk you might use in return. Yay! Also I joked that with the fuzzy logic brain 'n all, it might be intelligent enough to become my new best friend.

And it has.

I haven't done anything crazy in it yet but make white rice and brown rice. Okay, I attempted to make steel cut oats twice, which sort of yielded goopy nightmares, but the oats that remained in the pot were delicious. (I should add that I've never made steel cut oats before and so they sort of astound me and I'm sure it'll just take some experimentation with the water ratio. Also the oats all remained in the pot...the goopy mess was the...oat water that had congealed?) The cake was at someone else's place so I can't count that. But combined with my normal stores of pickled vegetables I never get around to eating (kimchee, cucumbers in soy sauce, etc) I am in snacking heaven. It feels healthier too than some of my past snacking habits. (Until you factor in just how much rice I can inhale with the right sesame and seaweed seasoning and then I remember why I don't lose weight.)

And so, as with I later admitted with getting a real bed, I concede that a rice cooker is a good investment. Tending periodically to a pot of rice doesn't take much work, but setting a timer for rice to be done when you're back from errands is pretty clutch. And since my jaw has been hurting the past few weeks it's been nice to have large amounts of rice porridge (mixed with sweet potatoes! mm) as a staple starch around. You win, Asian-and-now-common-American-apartment-dweller wisdom.