Are you tired of making plain old white rice over and over again? Maybe you’re considering buying a small rice cooker, but you’re unsure if you would use it enough, so it pays for itself? Don’t worry; that’s why we’ve put together this list of five creative ways you can use a rice cooker to make new, fun, and unique meals.
As for the recipes, you can implement any of your own or think up new ones; we’re just here to provide inspiration that’s sometimes necessary when you don’t even know where to start with today’s lunch.
Creative Ways to Use a Rice Cooker
1. Steam Vegetables
First, let’s cut the rice out of the picture for a moment. Steaming your vegetables is the absolute healthiest way to prepare them – they keep almost all of their nutritional values and vitamins when prepared this way. The simplest way to do it is to use your rice cooker without almost any prep or watching over it.
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Make that steamed broccoli, carrots, or whatever else you could think of, and serve it as a healthy and tasty side dish that will go nicely with practically everything. It’s quick, easy, and healthy, everything you could ask for from a cooking method.
2. Make Unique Dishes with Rice & Vegetables
Now, let’s bring the rice back, and with a bang. Let’s add those vegetables to the rice and let them cook together. Not only will the vegetables turn out amazing by themselves, but preparing them alongside rice will get their juices flowing, and rice is there to soak them right up.
Once again, this can be any vegetable of your choice; basically, anything you like can be mixed with rice to make a tasty meal. And don’t forget the soy sauce – if that’s your thing, you pretty much can’t go wrong with it.
3. Make Amazingly Tender Chicken
Here, we’re starting to think outside the box – just like with various vegetables, you can mix chicken in with your rice, either diced or in whole pieces. Cooking it this way, with just a little chicken stock added, will make sure that the chicken is amazingly tender, and the rice will gather up all the cooking juices and be a meal of its own at that point.
Let’s not forget all the combinations you can make with various spices. From the soy sauce mentioned above to curry, powdered garlic, and whatever else your cooking brain could imagine – those will be distributed evenly to the chicken and the rice, giving both different but equally tasty properties.
4. Make the Fluffiest Eggs
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With this, we’ve gone completely out of the box and forgot where the box is. Yes, you can make eggs in your rice cooker – it may sound weird, but the results speak for themselves. It’s the simplest recipe you could think of; you just need eggs, seasoning, and whatever vegetables you have lying around the kitchen.
Beat the eggs in, add all of your other ingredients and let them cook for about 10 minutes in a lightly oiled rice cooker. The result will be extremely fluffy eggs with minimal grease and seasoned to perfection. Although you can’t make crispy bacon in the rice cooker – you can certainly add it to the fluffiest eggs you ever tried for breakfast to be remembered.
5. Make Your Own Sauces
Now we can touch upon the versatility that a rice cooker actually has. It isn’t just about adding stuff to rice or steaming things with it – you can make sauces, from scratch, in your rice cooker. Of course, some prep work is necessary, but you won’t have to worry about your sauce burning up this way.
You can make virtually any sauce, from classics like apple and cranberry sauces to your favorite pasta sauce. There’s little need to stir it regularly, and you will be sure that everything in there is cooked. It might take a couple of tries to get it right, but once you do, you’ll see why it was worth the trouble.
In Conclusion
We hope that we managed to convince you that a rice cooker is a versatile tool that every kitchen should have and that you can make a lot of things other than plain white rice using this method. Feel free to experiment with the ingredients and recipes and possibly make something brand new that you can share with your friends and family – after all, that’s what food is really about.
