What's In My Kitchen: A Zojirushi Rice Cooker

I have had my eye on a rice cooker for awhile. And ironically, not so much for its rice cooking abilities (which will of course come in handy) but for its ability to cook oatmeal. Earlier in the year I was on a major steel-cut oats kick, but the 25-30 minute cooking time definitely put a damper in my interest to cook it every day. Of course, I could have made a big batch and then re-heated servings throughout the week, bit it just isn't the same. Hence, a rice cooker with a timer that I could set the night before to have the oatmeal ready in the morning when I wanted it. I did a little research and determined that Zojirushi rice cookers are highly-rated and not completely insanely priced. I'd been keeping my eye on Zojirushi prices on Amazon.com for awhile, and all of a sudden last week there was a price I could not refuse. Even better, the 10-cup machine was being offered at a lower price than a similar, but lower-capacity, machine. I jumped on it, and we are now the proud owners of our very own Zojirushi rice cooker!

Today was our first chance to give it a try -- if I had been more on it, I would have set it up to have the oatmeal ready in the morning. But, looks like I'll have to try out the timer some other time. The great thing about the timer system is that you set it for the time you want the rice/oatmeal to be done, rather than when you want it to start. Such a brilliant feature! Plus, with a warming system, you don't have to worry about eating it once it's ready. So great.

To make two hearty servings of steel-cut oats, I combined 3/4 C of steel-cut oats with 2 3/4 C water in the inner pot, shut the lid, chose the Porridge setting, and hit the Cooking button. Couldn't be easier. The entire cooking process took just over an hour, so clearly using the rice cooker is not the best option when you're starving. But again, for oats, we're really looking forward to using the timer feature, so today was really just a test run.

When the oats were ready, the rice cooker plays a short tune, letting you know the food inside is ready to be served. There was a bit of liquid on top of the oats when I opened the lid, but a quick stir with the provided spatula took care of that.

I've seen a lot of interesting oatmeal toppings while surfing through blogland lately, so I thought I would branch out from my typical nut, dried fruit, or brown sugar toppings and tried out a spoonful of natural peanut butter and a spoonful of organic raspberry preserves. These toppings were quite tasty when stirred into the oats. Mmm! I'm definitely looking forward to exploring more exotic toppings in the future!