Packable Stackable Rice Cooker Risotto

It’s Sunday. Or rather, it’s Sunday as of the time that this blog post goes live. Anyone who shares a lifestyle of the 9-to-5 variety is likely groaning inwardly: “What in the world am I going to bring to the office for lunches this week that is relatively healthy, cheap, doesn’t make me want to die when I eat it on consecutive days and neither attracts the coworkers in an ooh-aah kind of way nor repels them with skunk-like force?”

Your thoughts exactly, right?

Well, even if not, I assume I can get an “amen” when I say that I feel like I’ve done myself a serious solid if I can manage to prepare a week’s worth of healthy lunches by Sunday night for (hopefully much) less than $5 a serving. I do not dig coming home at the end of a long day and preparing 75% of tomorrow’s eats when all I want is to fill my pie hole with today’s dinner. Or pie. Whatever.

So when I came across Angela’s Easy Creamy Tomato Barley Risotto, I thought, that sounds awesome. I also thought, I can make that meal meet all my lunch criteria. But it would be nice if it cooked itself.

Turns out dreams do come true.

Rice Cooker Tomato Risotto (Vegan, Gluten-Free)
Adapted from Oh She Glows

Ingredients:

• 1 cup brown rice + 1 cup quinoa (or 2 cups dry whole grain of choice)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp dried Italian herbs
• 1 tsp crushed garlic
• 1 28oz can diced tomatoes
• 2 cups coconut milk (or other non-dairy milk)
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup nutritional yeast
• 1 tbsp miso mixed with 1 tbsp warm water
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• At least 2 cups frozen vegetables of your choice

Makes 5-6 servings

Add all ingredients to your rice cooker and switch on. When it’s done, you’re done. Divide into 5 containers to bring to work or freeze for another week.

Note: I piled my veggies of choice (mixed chopped vegetables and chopped spinach) into the rice cooker with everything else, but next time, I think I would actually stir them in after the rice cooker had finished and switched to warm. The heat from the cooking process would have thawed it all and the reheating in the office microwave would take care of any further cooking that the veggies might need.

For display purposes only, I ate my first serving atop some fresh baby spinach and dusted with parmesan (not vegan! Just saying so the police don’t slap my wrist), but the other 4 servings I have enjoyed just as they were, reheated in the ancient Corningware bowl I keep in my desk.

I don’t know if this dish would have come out much differently had I cooked it on the stove, but I thought it was pretty delicious fresh out of the rice cooker. Next time, I might add 1/4-1/2 cup tomato paste for an extra punch of tomato flavor, but then again, I might not. We’ll see!

No rice cooker? Aww. Buy one here. Or just make Angela’s recipe as originally intended!

What do you do for handy, inexpensive, healthy lunches for the average weekday? I’m always on the lookout for new ideas!

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New Rice Cooker, New Riceabilities

CSN recently gave me the opportunity to review a rice cooker and I can honestly say that I’ve had a total blast playing with it over the past several weeks.

For those of you who might wonder why anyone would ever want a seemingly single-function (not to mention LARGE) appliance, allow me to show you exactly how exciting this thing really is.

First, let’s get one thing straight:

Almost all rice cookers also function as steamers, so there’s another use for it already. Devoted roaster that I am, I don’t do a ton of steaming, but for what it’s worth, I used my rice cooker exclusively for steaming frozen dumplings and broccoli while I was living in China. Why? I didn’t actually know it was a rice cooker at the time. Don’t laugh—if you were able to go out for amazing Chinese food for $4 or less per meal (which also kept us drunk for an entire year, might I add), you wouldn’t have spent much time in your kitchen either.

But I digress.

For my first feat of rice cooker mastery, I cooked rice.

Don’t laugh—this is a big step for someone who previously could not recognize a rice cooker in the first place.

I was delighted to find that it came out just like it does in restaurants! Perfect and chewy (this was brown rice), and without the usual soggy layer that I always got when I used to cook it stovetop.

I put some in a bowl,

covered it with some roasted stuff,

and ate it. The end. I guess that’s not a very exciting story, so for argument’s sake let’s say I also found $10.

Now that I had the hang of rice cookery, I got a little wacky and engaged my favorite rice cooker feature (which we should note is not standard): the delay timer.

It was a Thursday evening after work, and I was about to leave for a 7pm dance class. I didn’t want to have dinner right before dancing because that feels crappy, but I knew I’d be ravenous when I got home, even if I did have a snack to tide me over.

Rice cooker to the rescue! HEAB gave me this brilliant idea, to which I added a few extra ingredients. Into the rice cooker went 1 cup brown rice, 1 can light coconut milk, 1 tbsp curry powder and about 1/2 tsp salt, plus a healthy heap of frozen veggies.

I set the delay timer to have it finished when I got home from class. I arrived home to a delicious waft of curryness and hastily threw some kabocha (which I’d chopped and tossed with oil and S+P before I left) into the oven to roast. Meanwhile, I stirred 1 can of (drained and rinsed) chickpeas and  a spoonful of peanut butter into the finished rice mixture and left it on the warm setting.

30 minutes later, dinner was served.

And it was pretty much the best (homemade) thing I’ve eaten in a while.

The lesson here? You can cook rice in liquids other than water! Don’t laugh—we all know someone with a talent for burning water, to whom cooking rice in something else would surely seem extremely dangerous.

Now we have established that your rice cooker can, in fact, produce an entire meal for you, involving as little or as much work as you’d like. If I hadn’t taken the time to roast that squash, I could have been eating as soon as I was able to get a bowl from the cupboard.

So let’s get fancy, shall we? Let’s test this thing’s limits!

Select a recipe. Gather some extra-special ingredients. A little local kimchi:

Some toasted nori (The TJ’s clerk told me some customers practically rioted when they ran out of this stuff):

(Don’t laugh—I know that bad things would happen if anything came between me and my favorite ice cream, so I’ll have a little sympathy for the nori freaks enthusiasts.)

And assemble your first homemade bibimbap! After my rice had cooked, I just threw in the rest of the ingredients, though if you read the recipe I was following you’d note that I could have even steamed the spinach and salmon in the rice cooker too—I chose to do them stovetop, in the interest of time.

Resetting the cooker back to cook mode meant that the eggs cooked right in there, after a few minutes.

Stir it all up…

And FEAST.

I plated my bibimbap over some arugula for no particular reason except it needed using (I know, I am so not Korean for doing that. News flash.) and served it with some roasted kabocha because I’m obsessed with it right now.

I used the little nori strips as grabbers for each bite, laying them over the food and pinching the ends together with my chopsticks—observe mad skills:

And it was so. good.

Maybe worth rioting.

Do you own a rice cooker? Tell me your favorite recipes!