An ode to the rice cooker

One of the first things I bought when I moved to college was a rice cooker. It was simple, the kind that costs 20 bucks at any old appliance or homeware store and has exactly two settings: on and off. Sure, it was hard to clean the gummy, burned rice off the bottom of the bowl in my dorm room’s thimble of a bathroom sink. And there was no eating the gelatinous, unevenly cooked mess that the machine tried to pass off as brown rice. But it served me well through two years of dorm living.

A few years out of college, a cousin decided that it was time for me to officially cross over into adulthood. She graduated me to a new kind of rice cooker, one that to this day is the smartest thing in my kitchen.

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