Rice rice rice

So it’s been about a month since I bought this new device:

Tada! It’s a rice cooker, and with it a path to a, hopefully, healthier lifestyle. I’ve been eating a lot of salads lately, but what normally ends my trend in eating healthier foods is when meals become repetitive and dull, which eventually leads me back to eating junk like hot dogs and fast food in large quantities. So to deflect the temptation of going back to fattier and sugary foods, I needed a way to introduce more meals to the lineup, and what better way of adding dishes to the mix than to bring in a side dish to the menu like rice.

I love rice, but I’ve never liked cooking it as it requires you to babysit it the whole time, constantly stirring it to prevent the rice at the bottom of the pot from burning. I feel like I can make that time more productive by multitasking in the kitchen. So instead I normally buy the Uncle Ben's Ready Rice that come in microwavable pouches that you cook for 90 seconds and it’s ready. Those are really flavorful and easy to make, but geez are they expensive. So those are some of the reasons why I wanted to invest in a rice cooker: to have it cook the rice for me and to save money by buying rice in bulk.

On Amazon I bought the Zojirushi NS-VGC05 Electric Rice Cooker and Warmer. It’s compact so it doesn’t take too much countertop space and it cooks up to 3 cups of rice at a time. I love it because it has so many functions like a timer so I can prep everything before I go to bed and have warm rice ready to go when I want to eat something like natto for breakfast, and it has a “keep warm” mode that keeps the rice…well, warm until you are ready to serve it. It automatically flips to this mode after it’s done cooking. In addition it has something called “fuzzy logic” that makes setting what you want to cook as simple as pressing just one button. Meaning, you don’t have to worry about what kind of rice you’re using, or how much rice, or how much water you put in. It just works!

I’m lucky that I live just down the street from an Asian supermarket so I can buy rice in bulk there and have a variety from rice to select from. For the past month I’ve been cooking just plain old brown and white rice. For the white rice, I’ve been experimenting with making onigiri, but with minimal success for the look of it. Instead of softly shaped triangles, mine normally end up looking lumpy and deformed.

Another advantage of living near an Asian supermarket is so I can select ingredients to stuff the onigiri rice balls with. Mainly I’ve been using tuna with some Japanese mayonnaise labeled Kewpie. This tastes really good. I also bought a package of bonito flakes and mixed it with some soy sauce. And then I bought a small jar of akaume zuke, a pickled plum from Japan. I think it’s also named umeboshi, but I’m not 100% sure (I’m new at all of this). Then to top it off I wrap the onigiri with some nori, which is really tasty to where I like to cover the whole ball with it rather than just a small strip at the bottom.

I eat the onigiri either at lunch when at work or just for dinner. I like to think it’s healthier than consuming a cup of instant soup that’s crammed with a high amount of sodium or eating some big meal, because with rice it tends to act as filler and gives me a sense of feeling full without needing to eat a lot. In terms of quality I think this model of Zojirushi really fits the bill as it has a bunch of nifty features and comes in a compact size. And when it comes to adding rice to meals, it gives me a number of opportunities to create many dishes, so I’m planning to be looking online for some great meals in the coming months.

If you want to know more about rice cookers and the kinds of things you can do with one, I highly recommend checking out this episode of Japanology. That lady that cooks stuff with it like an oven is nuts!

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