Rice Cooker Cooking

When Tobie and I first started out living together here at the Sietch in 2009, neither of us really knew how to cook. Both of us had at least fried stuff here or there and I knew how to cook rice both via a rice cooker or on the stove but that was it. But instead of just resigning ourselves to potentially years of ordering take-out, we both committed to learning to cook instead.

In that first year, the rice cooker was our primary cooking appliance. Beyond just making rice, we started a lot of experiments with what we could do with the rice cooker ranging from steaming items or actually mixing other things into the pot. Thus we had a lot of topped rice sort of meals like canned tuna over rice or some veggies mixed in. It was rather simple fare, but we were proud of what came out and we celebrated each mile like an extravagant feast.

Over the years, we've both learned a lot about cooking. I went back to my childhood and tried to explore the various dishes I grew up with. Thus a lot of classic Filipino soups like sinigang, nilaga and tinola and little home innovations like what my grandmother always called Mexican Relish. Tobie was a bit more daring and looked for interesting recipes online. Thus he's pretty handy now with baking fish and he can cook things like eggplant parmigiana and my favorite cilantro salad.

Together we come up with some pretty eccentric meals but at the end of the day we're really happy. We've long since retired the rice cooker since I prefer to cook rice on the stove, but it's nice to look back at our "history" of meals at the Sietch and appreciate just how far we've come.