Tell us what you have cooked lately (that's interesting)

Armando captures it well. I find the food good there. It’s a chain but a good one.

We usually get this chinese salad with chicken. It’s huge and one of the best salads I’ve had – very light. We split it and also gorge on the free fresh-baked bread and butter. It’s not too bad price-wise that way.

If you need reading glasses, don’t forget them. The menu is novel-length.

I have made this many times and it’s amazing, not to mention stupid easy.

The menu book at Cheesecake Factory has always scared me by it’s sheer size and number of items. I always wonder just how well you can execute a menu of that size.

Not a participant til tonight, but I thought this all looked good and was easy and well received by the kids. BBQ pork loin, Zatarain’s yellow rice (box, but I think it’s quite good) and seasoned frozen green beans with onion, italian seasoning, garlic salt and toasted panko breadcrumbs.

I do things from scratch too but weeknight meals need speed. I will say that the rice cooker is probably my favorite small appliance as a single dad.

I know I’m opening up a can of worms, there are some diehard camps here on which brand is best. But any recommendations on a rice cooker?

I need to have something large enough to handle 4 cups of dry rice. The tiny unit we have now is pretty featureless and can do about 2 1/2 cups of dry.

Wirecutter dot com.

There are some crazy $500+ Korean ones (Cuckoo), that do all sorts of stuff you probably don’t care about. I’d probably just buy a mid range Zojirushi.

People say that an instant pot makes acceptable rice. They are either lying, or have incredibly low standards for rice.

We use this one. They have smaller versions as wel.

https://www.amazon.com/Zojirushi-NS-ZCC10-Uncooked-Premium-1-0-Liter/dp/B000A7NN4I/ref=sr_1_4?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1519184084&sr=1-4&keywords=zojirushi%2Brice%2Bcooker&th=1

https://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-719-16-Classic-Stainless-Saucepan/dp/B00008CM69/ref=sr_1_3?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1519185174&sr=1-3&keywords=saucepan

(this was just the first result when I searched saucepan. But seriously, stovetop works fine. And the Instant Pot does too, come to that.)

@Skipper, my gf just got me an awesome Zojirushi for Xmas. It’s one of the higher end models with lots of extra features and fuzzy logic stuff, so you may want to step down a level or two, depending on your price tolerance, but I have to say that the last month of use has really impressed me.

It’s super efficient, easy to use, easy to clean, and has cool features like playing a little song when it’s done and the ability to do an extended Keep Warm for the better part of a day that’s kinda magical.


@DaveLong, that meal looks ultra tasty up there to me! I am envious :-D


Tonight I more or less made Serious Eats’ “Halal Cart Chicken” complete with spiced basmati rice, tangy white sauce, and crisp marinated Mediterranean chicken. It’s one of my favorite meals ever. I tossed in a grilled piece of pita flatbread and some of Alton Brown’s “Humus For Real” (with some extra cumin added in and topped with paprika rather than the sumac he recommends).



Holy cow that looks good.

And thanks for the quick recommendations for rice cooking, guys.

@CLWheeljack I agree with you. I’ve made rice in my instant pot, its sticky and at least when I made it, lightly burned on the bottom. Not so hot.

@malkav11 I make rice currently in either a large lidded saute pan or the tiny craptastic rice cooker we have. I get better results from the saute pan, but I have to monitor it to get the best results.

I tend to throw things in with the rice, which I’m sure affects the variance of my results.

I have had pretty good results with rice in the instant pot when I rinsed it first and used the time and water instructions on hippressurecooking.com. I don’t doubt a dedicated rice cooker could do better but on the other hand I for one have quite limited kitchen storage and I can’t really justify an entire appliance for one thing I can already do fine.

The fancier rice cookers these days are actually pressure cookers as well, just tuned specifically for rice. I’m sure it’s possible for an instant pot to make good rice, but I’ve never seen it. I think there’s probably some pretty specific testing and dialing in that would need to be done.

I do think there’s probably a fundamental issue with the size of the vessel though, if you have a larger instant pot and are just making enough rice for 2-3 people.

Since I’m generally making rice at least 5 times a week, I don’t really mind a dedicated appliance.

Maybe I have never had great rice but I can’t imagine there being that much difference between the stuff I have made on the stove or in the instant pot and what I would get out of a dedicated rice cooker.

To me it isn’t something you just eat, it’s a substrate for other ingredients.

I make about 5-6 cups of rice a week. Once a week that’s a 4 cup cook which is plain white rice, and maybe a smaller 1 or 2 cup serving later in the week, usually something different like brown or jasmine.

I’ve only tried white rice in the instant pot and using the “rice” setting. I’m sure I could manually dial things in a bit with it. But based on what I’ve been reading this morning, it sounds like rice cookers are more akin to very specialized devices at what they do. The ones linked above both have microprocessors that work with sensors in the unit to determine where the rice is at during the cook, and can modify the time on the fly.

From everything I’ve seen and used with the instant pot, it’s a heat and time based system only. There is no variance once set. I may be wrong here.

The questions is how far down the rabbit hole I want to go for 6 cups of rice per week.

I’ve cooked a whole lot of rice in my life, in small sauce pans and boiled pasta style in big stockpots and even baked (ugh baked). It is very rare that I achieved the texture and flavor of my new rice cooker. While I certainly have, it wasn’t commonplace, and it meant extra timers, pots-on-stove, and, in the case of pasta-style rice (which routinely produces the best results for me), a LOT of extra effort in draining and rinsing the rice (which means doing dishes right before the meal is to be served to clear out enough sink space for my big colander and the big pot itself (since it’s hot, but empty, so not a lot of places to put it). . .

I know that sounds like a lot of first world whining, but seriously, the rice cooker has made a measurable impact on my peace of mind and kitchen organization, not to mention made a lot of really tasty rice.


Now, all this aid, it’s not good for everything. I made the spiced rice above in a pot, because it requires cooking spices in hot butter, then frying the dry rice in said butter, then adding in broth, boiling, and simmering till steamed. Tough to split that between stove and rice cooker without creating unnecessary dishes and hassle, so I didn’t try.

And it won’t help my biryani making, since that requires partially cooked rice, and I have no idea what point along the 45-minute cook time (from cold water to complete rice) equates to 75% cooked for basmati rice :)

Any problem adding veggies into the rice that’s cooking? Is that something any of you guys have done with the fancy units?

I have not yet done so, but the PR for my model and its manual indicate it should handle that extremely well. There’s also a removable steamer basket to just set vegetables/meat over the cooking rice, if you so desire.

So here’s the thing about a rice cooker for me that makes it indispensable. You set it and you forget it. I use an el cheapo Aroma one given to me as a gift, but I could totally get onboard with a fancier one when this one dies, which may never happen. It’s this one…

https://www.amazon.com/Aroma-8-Cup-Digital-Cooker-Steamer/dp/B00WPHOWVE/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1519229533&sr=8-6&keywords=ARC-914SBD

I always found that making rice on the stove required so much more input than I had time for while cooking everything else, and when it was done, keeping it warm was also challenging if my timing was bad. This solves all that instantly.

I haven’t even used the vegetable steaming option or made soups in it, etc. It’s usually just white rice, although as noted in the pic above, I made a Zatarain’s box in it and I’ve used Rice-a-Roni boxes in it too. It’s just… easy. When you have kids, there’s no substitute for easy.

I like easy. The best I can do is on the stove (as far as the quality of rice I’ve cooked,) but I have to immediately remove it after cooking and plan on storing it once it’s rested and been fluffed up to serve. There is no “keep warm” for me, currently. Certainly not in a way that keeps the rice in an even state without getting overly dry and hard.

Our tiny rice cooker is a very old $25 dollar model that has two states of success: semi-decent small amounts of rice, or burned on the bottom larger amounts of rice. It’s starting to not work when you press cook, so I’m back to babysitting rice being made while I have other crap to cook and do.

I have one of those myself. I was looking into rice cookers and was about to bite on one of the fancier far more expensive “fuzzy logic” ones when a friend told me that these Aroma cookers work great. I picked one up and it does the job well for less than 1/2 the price. I have never had bad or burnt rice with it. Now an expensive Zojirushi might do a better job ( and for the price it had better ) but I have no complaints with the cheap Aroma.