Zojirushi.
http://www.amazon.com/Zojirushi-NS-ZCC10-Cooker-Warmer-Premium/dp/B00007J5U7/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1334447880&sr=1-1
This never fails. Brown rice, sweet rice, white rice, mixed rice, sticky rice—perfect. You can cook a week’s worth at one go, keep the extra in the fridge, and microwave what you need for the current dish, or an individual serving. Fill to appropriate water line, add rice by measure (included) This is a cooker popular in Asia, Thailand to Japan, and there’s a reason. Spoon, cord, spoonholder all detach and store in the interior, and the little handle lets you lift it and put it away with no fuss at all. Load it, push cook, walk off and leave it. THere’s, I believe, also a timer.
I love this thing.
This, while I’m at it is my other kitchen machine:
http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-CBK-200-2-Pound-Convection-Automatic/dp/B0009VELTQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1334448294&sr=1-1
Between these two, predictibly fresh bread and perfect rice of any type. That eliminates a lot of ‘surprise’ dinners as you have to cope with what didn’t work.
All the Zojirushi models are good. They also make 10 cup versions for those who need to feed a platoon. The upgrade from the one listed is their induction model (that’s the one I own). They also make an induction + pressure model, which cooks faster and makes softer rice (which is a plus or minus depending on your rice preferences).
My bread habits are funny lately. I use tortillas, which the local grocery store makes fresh in their deli/bakery. I’ll occasionally get a loaf of garlic bread or artisan bread or hamburger buns. I haven’t been getting regular white or wheat lately. Possibly because I’m not eating a bunch of bread, the idea of fixing it myself sounds good. Done deal.
The rice cooker? I don’t know, I fix rice fairly often and I’m increasing the Asian style foods I eat, trying recipes occasionally. But I tend to stick the rice in a pot, twice the water, let it boil til done while prepping other things, and no fuss. I thought of getting it, and still might, if it’s such a good gadget.
This reminds me to reorganize my kitchen, though, which is really needed.
One little thing, probably easy, I’ve found I wish I had, is a drawer, shelf, or divider for cookie sheets and the new pizza pan. The way my kitchen’s storage is designed, these always are “in the way” or about to fall over where stored. I tried putting them in the bit of space between the wall and fridge, but…yuck, cobwebs or other things, now and then. I’ll apply my thinking cap and check at Lowe’s and Home Depot.
I ordered a deep dish pizza pan and a set of two small pizza pans, to go with the large one. These were cheap but good quality, and will be handy for other flat cooking…or so I’m rationalizing. 😉
The pizza dough recipe you gave is the one I’ve been using whenever I’ve made it, with occasional added ingredients such as dried onion bits or grated Parmesan. However, I tend to go with whole wheat flour entirely, instead of mixing. That reminds me, I think I need cornmeal.
The Asian style spider / scoop / strainer you’d recommended is very handy. — I’ll make egg rolls or tuna or crab balls sometime soon.
I keep meaning to try the sweet potatoes / yams you’ve recommended in stir fry, but haven’t found that round-to-it yet. Potatoes? I don’t know why, but I haven’t been eating them lately. :shrugs:
I did have a craving for tuna salad this past week, so that’s on the menu.
BlueCatShip, A more permanent solution might be a length of quarter-round molding fixed to the floor of the cabinet so that you could lean them against the side of the cabinet, but the bottom edges wouldn’t slide out away from the wall. Or you could put quarter round molding along the top and bottom of the cabinet with the flat edge facing the cabinet wall and secure a piece of thin wood (lauan) to the quarter round to make a partition. You can get the home store to cut them to size, and paint them before installing. Then either nail or glue in place.
As for: “I did have a craving for tuna salad this past week, so that’s on the menu.” Me too. I use raw onions, chopped Kosher dills (not pickle relish!), and sliced black olives in mine.
WOL, thank you. I will head by the store this week and look about some moulding and wood. The problem is that my kitchen and cabinets have limited space, short of redoing one or two cabinets inside, but surely I can come up with a creative solution. Hmm, I wonder, a partition under one of the shelves or drawers, either set to slide out or not… hmm… thinking. Gotta be a solution, the kitchen is good overall, just oddly designed in some ways, IMHO.
We have been using a rice cooker since a babysitter from the Philippines said she would be happy to cook dinner for the children but she had to have a rice cooker. We love ours, but I don’t think it is as high end as the zojirushi. The non stick inner bowl in which the rice is cooked is losing some of its nonstick patina.
Our coffee pot, on the other hand , is a zojirushi and it is great.
You can buy replacement pots for some of these cookers.
Probably want to replace that pot for sure. Eating that ‘non-stick’ surface is pretty unhealty. 🙁
Sorry.. I meant ‘unhealthy’. Blah
Zojirushi makes great products.
Hum think I’ll make a loaf of bread in my Zojirushi bread make today. Actually already planned to do so, it will be ready in time for the monthly anime potluck group.
We just had one of our periodic dim sum family brunches, and afterwards for the first time we ducked into the Asian food store next door, where they had (drum rolls!!) Zijirushi rice cookers! Very handsome. And good to know where we can get one when ours dies.
A good bread machine is an essential appliance. Thanks to mine, I’ve made all of our bread for several years, ignoring the mass-produced loaves in the grocery store, so that I was surprised one day, noticing how the price of the commercial bread has gone up. Our own bread tastes better, and it has to be healthier, with no polysyllabic ingredients, and it’s much cheaper, too. And easy, with the bread machine.
I figure we eat a loaf every 4 days. That’s about 7 loaves a month at (depending on your taste) 8.40 for Wonder Bread or 21.00 for 3.00-5.00 a loaf. So that can be as high as 35.00 a month. And if you have sandwiches, it goes faster than that. The most expensive/abundant ingredient I use is flour and water, and the rest is a teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and 2 tbs of dry yeast, none of which will break the bank. My flour costs .67 a loaf, and I guarantee you I do as good an artisan loaf as you’ll buy. So for 4.67 for 7 loaves I’m getting what you could pay 35.00 for, and I’m pretty well convinced that 120.00 breadmaker has earned-out, meaning I think after 12 months, say, roughly, at 30.00 a month saved, that’s a shocking 360.00 I haven’t spent on bread.
Not too shabby. Counting we use it for breakfast instead of going out to eat, that’s a conservative 12.00 a day we’re not spending if we were eating breakfast sandwiches, so tack on 4380 we’re also saving, between coffee and omelets.
Now, if we ate every breakfast for a year at Waffles R Us, even more ruinous. That’d be 9855.00—and we’d be—ahem!—somewhat larger, ourselves. As is, breakfast costs Jane and me about a nickle apiece, since we split a slice of that bread. Tell me where else you can get breakfast for a nickle, eh? That’s 18.25 a year instead of 9855.00. I think I love that breadmaker.
While I recognize the appeal of bread machines, they are not actually essential to making an easy loaf of bread. I’ve been making our bread too for more years than I can now count. I have a sourdough starter I abuse, which lives in the refrigerator. Sourdough is actually easier than yeast (very hard to kill it in a loaf with too hot liquid), no need to measure accurately — much cheaper too). I basically dump ingredients together, mix them with my Kitchen Aide bread hood and let the dough rise for however long I feel like by juggling rising time in or outside of the fridge. The only downside to not using a bread machine is I need to somewhat prepare ahead of time, esp. if it is a work day. Probably my shortest turnaround with bread is 6-7 hours, depending on the temp of the house. I tend to let my bread rise overnight, esp. in the cold, winter kitchen.
I put my bread and other recipes into a cookbook I titled “Bread Unbound: A Relaxed Bread and Sourdough cookbook” which I use as a textbook for my course “Breaking Bread: A Social History of Food.”
Lol, Raesean, I do respect the old method, no question. I’ve done it. But boy! you do get your exercise. My gran, the physical model for Ilisidi, used to attack a mound of dough that would make 3 loaves at once, when they had a lot of hands working harvest, and, arthritis and all, she’d knead that stuff with a vengeance—she finally had to stop doing it, and we were all sorry to go to store-bought bread. I did it for her now and again, when I was a 12 year old kid who was no wilting violet, and I’d be out of breath. One thing she did teach me was the right ‘feel,’ which you really have to handle to grok, fully. I tell you what really tipped me over toward the machines was the eternal hunt for the right spot to let it rise. It was easy in her kitchen: that old mica-window stove was warm as toast in the winter, occasionally in the spring with a box of hatchling chicks in the vicinity, and July in Oklahoma with no air conditioning, well, yeast has no problem there. But everywhere I’ve lived part of the year has been at 65 and the rest of the year I can’t find a safe spot for it to sit. When I lived on the lake I even put it in the garage, and that gave me pause re germs, even though, intellectually, I knew it was covered and I should have gotten over it with the baby chickens and pheasants.
Because this machine controls the environment, it’s got the magical self-adjusting weather condition, and it automatically does that humidity-in-the-baking thing that produces a good crunchy crust. I could never quite get that right, before.
So you have a cookbook! Neat!
A self-published cookbook… but I really ought to get the guts and time up to run it by a real publisher. I thoroughly enjoy doing up my favorite recipes into cookbooks. My Social History of Food course also ends with the students compiling a class cookbook of their favorite recipes they have learnt from family, friends and strangers they interview.
I agree that the hunt for a warm, humid place in a cold, winter house can be a bother. The downside of my Unbound method is that the amount of time for the bread to rise varies with the temp of the house. But, if I want it to rise fast in our unheated kitchen, I either put the covered bowl of dough in the oven (not turned on) or in the microwave with a pan of very hot water (replaced every hour or so): that creates a nice, steamy, quick environment. I do admit I cheat most of these days on the kneading and use the electric mixer. I also just, finally, started using a no-knead recipe from King Arthur Flour and have at last achieved a lovely, chewy, hole-y European-style bread. The secret is apparently little kneading and a very wet dough: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/roasted-apple-bread-recipe . You bake the bread in a cast-iron pot/dutch oven. I’m making it yet again for folks at work tomorrow.
(My Grandma had a mica-windowed cast-iron stove too, that she rescued from a junk dealer and refinished herself sometime in the 40’s or 50’s!)
Raesean, please consider putting that out as an ebook or ebook and paper through Lulu or Smashwords or elsewhere. I’d be very interested.
Don’t know the vintage of gran’s, but the house was probably started about 1910. The great-grans lived up the hill somewhat in a little 3 room house, the original on the homestead, and I doubt that it goes quite that far back. And it was gas, not wood, which is kind of an interesting point. Oklahoma was one of the biggest producers, if not the biggest, of natural gas: Oklahoma Natural Gas was founded in 1906, right along with the state…1907. And her home was right in the near neighborhood of gas wells, so it was available there earlier than other places, in spite of the fact Oklahoma was one of the last states into the Union. So that stove was older than any safety valves—you turned the little valve on the line, lit the pilot behind the isinglass shield, which lit the oven, and once that was going you still had to light the burners with a match. I thought all stoves were supposed to work that way, so it never bothered me that our gas range WE had was broken and we had to light it with matches, too—didn’t that work for all stoves? One of my last duties every night as a kid was to check the range and make sure all the dials were turned back to OFF. I really mourned that stove when we got this electric monster. First time me mum caught me grilling a hotdog on the coils, my name was toast-girl.
If, no make that “when,” I get a bread machine, I’ll have to figure out where to put it in this little postage stamp of a kitchen I have. I have about 2 yards of counter space on one side (one on each side of the sink), and a yard on the other (half a yard on each side of the stove). The idea really appeals to me, though, because I have to buy for a whole month when I buy, and freeze everything but the package I’m actually eating on. None of the bread ingredients requires any energy expenditure to store. A bread machine and a recipe for tanduri naan and I’d be in hog heaven – and this Texas gal sure does love her Brot.
I got this marvelous clear glass ‘jar’—really a giant cannister with a lid that’s gravity-held. It easily holds 10 lbs of flour, and might go 20. I know your kitchen, WOL—mine’s not much more working space, though in a shotgun fashion it goes on to open out into a dining area. And I have, thank you, God! a small pantry at the end of it. The prep space is small. But the bread machine can live on a shelf there—it’s about 18″ x14″ x 12 high, one of the smallest breadmakers. I got a small clear breadbox from Amazon, literally just big enough for the loaf, and a bread cutting tray it sits on.http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-370-Bread-Slicerand-Catcher/dp/B00004UE6T/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1334588904&sr=1-1 —catches crumbs, and the box http://www.amazon.com/Progressive-International-Adjustable-Bread-Keeper/dp/B001BB2LMM/ref=sr_1_4?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1334588951&sr=1-4
sits on it. I don’t use the slicer as advertised: I put the loaf butt-up against the side and use the slats of the catcher as a slicing guide—the sides are too flimsy. The box destroys the crunchiness of the crust once you store it overnight, but the toaster restores it.
The other thing I recommend is the scales. http://www.amazon.com/Escali-Estilo-Designer-Kitchen-Scale/dp/B000KPZM62/ref=sr_1_352?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1334590076&sr=1-352
This beautifully designed number flips, so the base sits in the bowl for storage—and it’s easily adjusted for use with any bowl. We also use it for mail.
One of you, dear readers, advised me to go by weight on flour—and it is sooooo much easier. 1 lb of flour = 3 cups, the standard bread machine loaf…and it’s a case of scoop it up in a coffee cup from that big jar, dump it in the scales-bowl, add a little wheat bran by eye, dump it into the machine. THAT’s why I can bake with no flour scattered about and no mess and have that machine loaded and running inside 5 minutes. For a process that can take hours to finish and involve the whole kitchen—I just treat it as a routine 5 minute thing I do every few days. And the smell is to die for.
One thing we have in our tiny kitchen is two shelf-high rolling tables. RIght now they’re holding winter plants at the window, but when it’s Christmas cookie baking, those go into action.
Our kitchen and bath are 1950’s-small. But now that the bath’s beautiful, our next target is that kitchen—next year. I was appalled when I saw how small—literally, if the dishwasher door is down, only one of us can edge through at a time. Very ‘shotgun.’ But extremely well-designed. The dish storage (thank Jane for this idea) is right above the dishwasher, so it’s bend down/reach up, and the pot storage is under the opposing counter, so it’s lean sideways and shove the pot under that counter. It’s the dishwasher that keeps the kitchen efficient. I have 4 of 2 sets of plates and saucers; 3 sets of 4 bowls, 2 little saucepans, 1 big one, and 2 big t-fal skillets, one omelet pan and my iron skillet. You use prescribed pots for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you offload and load the dishwasher while waiting for the toaster, run it during breakfast, and the dishes and pots go another round. I’ve got few big items: the breadmaker, the rice cooker, and in some seasons the crockpot are the ones in regular use, and the rest live in less convenient storage.
Have the directions to get these items via Closed Circle so you can get whatever referral fee when we get them.
I’ve got one of those big glass lidded jars — about halfway between soccer ball and beach ball size. Right now it’s being a portable beach in the living room, but hmmmmmm. I usually get $$$ from my folks for my birthday (next month) so hmmmmmm. I saw that bread box — you know how dry it is up here in the Tx Panhandle, so is good that you can cut off air circulation. I’ll have to check out our health food store for some “specialty flours.” Small loaves that I could eat without needing to refrigerate them. Home made ciabatta bread, oat bread, multigrain bread. . . Oh, major, major drule!
My very, very favorite recipe for bread: in bottom of pan: 3 tbs Virgin Olive Oil; 1 tsp salt; 1 tsp honey; 1 1/2 cups warm water; 1 lb Gold Medal Good for Bread flour, 1/2 cup wheat bran, [helps the crust and it’s good for you] and if you have it, 2 tbs brown rice flour. 2 tsp dry yeast. [The rice flour tends to give you a slightly delicate crumbliness to the crust.]
Knead until glossy. Let rise 3x. Bake at 425 until slightly brown (my guess, because the bread machine does this part) and I would say, put a container of water into the oven to make that thick crunchy crust.
One thing with the bread machines: DON’T use hard seeds or bulgur wheat with these, because the intense action during mixing wears off the no-stick coating from the pan. Those are for hand-done loaves.
Amazon says my bread machine was shipped today and due in less than a week. Hmm, I think I might’ve gotten the very breadbox you mentioned. Anyway, I ordered one.
I’ll try that bread recipe. No rice flour on hand…I’ll need another container to store it, too. LOL.
I’d reiterate: Raesean, that cookbook would be a hit with fellow fans and could supplement your professorial income. 🙂
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Hahahaha! Smokey has gotten into something he shouldn’t, but dang it, the silly cat always wants to be in the middle of the action and into something. Curious, intelligent, goofy little so-and-so! And Goober, bless his non-assertive polite soul, is always curious too. He’ll occasionally get into trouble too. LOL, two bright little souls in the grand scheme of the universe.
Guess what? I mentioned to my mom yesterdaythat I wanted a bread machine for my birthday and she said order it and charge it to her! And my B-day is not until next month! It is to arrive in three to five business days from yesterday!!! Now I’m going to have to go get flour and yeast, dump out my portable beach into something else and wash the jar, . . . .I already have the EV olive oil. . .Oh, excitement! — *does happy dance*
Yay!
I think you will enjoy this immensely. And it will pay for itself within a year if you use bread regularly.
Drat, my local store didn’t have rice flour, and to compound it, I forgot to ask anyone to stock some. They had soy flour and rye flour, even a box mix for beignets, oh my! I looked thoroughly in the flour/baking section, but didn’t go back and scour the Asian ingredients section.
However, I did get Thai red curry packets and coconut milk. I misjudged freezer space, so I’m cooking a pack of chicken and will likely do the recipe tonight. I’ll have to rotate out something else in the freezer and store the other cooked chicken. No way I can eat all that right away. But…nice to have a problem of too much than too little.
Also, I was stunned to spend only $71 and still get what I needed for the next week or more. I can’t recall when I last spent that little for a week or two’s groceries.
Cooking CJ’s Thai red curry recipe, with two modifications: I’m using one large Irish potato and one sweet potato (yam, probably) sliced thin, keeping the skins (scrubbed thoroughly), and toward the end, adding a package of stir-fry veggies to gain freezer space. Chicken had already been cooked, so I waited until the potatoes and red curry were boiling well to add that. I’ve now added the coconut milk, chicken (cut bite size) and stir fry veggies. Giving it additional cooking time, because the potatoes weren’t as done as I thought, and to cook the veggies and condense the sauce. Whew, this is going to be a bit hotter than I’m used to, I think, but it looks and smells fantastic already. I’ll have chai-vanilla tea with it (Bigelow’s brand, IIRC).
One side note: the smell of the curry spice and coconut milk got Smokey excited when I came in to type this up. He had to sniff where I’d sampled the sauce. Then he was satisfied. But I wonder if he’ll show further interest.
Off to stir madly and finish the cooking! — Oh, also, I transferred from large skillet to medium to large size wok, when I saw I might overflow ingredients. Sure enough, this was a smart move.