Food and Cooking

Honestly I didn't really think too much about it, I used to use a simple on-off rice cooker but it kept on burning and sticking on the bottom. I saw an article that said Zojirushi is the best and the rice is the same consistency from top to bottom, and it completely worked as advertised. Now we have a Zojirushi water boiler and steel waterbottles as well, all their stuff is so high quality.

Standard rice cooker uses magnetism to turn off. The steel bowl loses its magnetic attraction when it gets hot - like 400 oC - and it can't get that hot when there's water. Basically, they go full blast until the water boils off, then shut down. As long as the cooker is pretty full, the residual water/steam in the rest of the rice will bring the whole bowl back to 100 oC pretty fast and rehydrate any of the bottom layer that got crispy. If you run a conventional rice cooker under-loaded, you're more likely to get stuck/burned bottom.

I have a cheap, 4 cup rice cooker, but I usually make just 1 cup at a time. Unplug it after 7-12 minutes and it won't burn. I're pretty forgiving. I've used rice cookers from the little 4-cup to big 5-pound commercial cookers. Rice, water to the fingernail/1st joint, go. It's amazing. If you cook rice regularly, just get one.

Great find! Best I've done was find a perfectly good table next to the dumpster lol

What interesting questions, I'll start with a suggestion for an addition: mushrooms! I think they'll really help to bring out the umami of the dish, and there are so many different types with variations of flavor and texture: I add portabella mushrooms to risotto, king oyster to soups and stir-frys, enoki is also really good in soup, black mushrooms are good in anything... I'll just grab a few random varieties every time I'm at the store.

If the seasoning feels lacking try adding some acidity (lemon, lime, or rice vinegar), white pepper, and/or curry powder.

Also I'm not great at estimating dimensions, especially now that I'm trying to think in metric units, but I think when I saute things my cuts are considerably larger to preserve more of the texture of the ingredients. I'll only shred the carrots if I'm cooking them with the rice in the rice cooker, otherwise I'll go for something like this and have the onion julienned instead of diced, cabbage in like 1 inch squares, baby bok choi leaves whole. Oh also I feel like the baby white bok choi is better for cooking in the rice cooker, but the baby green bok choi is better for sautes.

Also choy-sum is like my new favorite vegetable but I just normally have it on its own, as opposed to bok choi, cabbage, or brocolli which I normally saute with other things. I'll also usually cook gai-lan on its own, as well as green beans, asparagus, and brussels sprouts. Since green beans need so much time and heat to cook, I'll normally use snow pea pods or sugar snap pea pods instead if I'm working with a mix of veggies.

For brussels sprouts I cut them in half and saute them face down on high heat until they fully caramelize to a golden brown, then flip them on their backs and add a tiny bit of water so they steam just enough to cook through. You don't want to boil them or steam them too much or it will create bitter notes.

My curry will always have onion, carrot, mushroom, and cauliflower. Daikon, cabbage, yamaimo/nagaimo, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts, are also good additions. For lentils I'll usually cook them with onion, mushroom, carrot, celery, and tuscan kale. I prefer them to still have some texture but my wife prefers it as a soup instead. Oh and I forgot to mention I'll usually also pair the quinoa with sauted spinach, kale, and bell pepper.