felt<\/em> difficult to me, and so I never do it.<\/p>\r\nSo I bought a rice cooker. I ended up picking the one recommended by Wirecutter: the Z\u014djirushi Neuro Fuzzy NS-ZCC10.<\/p>\r\n
It took a while to get here after I ordered it, and it ended up arriving on a day when I had lots of leftovers, so it took me a few days to get around to using it. But I eventually did.<\/p>\r\n
(On a side note: the rice cooker is super cute. I\u2019ve seen other people\u2019s Z\u014djirushi rice cookers, but somehow this one seems especially friendly to me\u2014white and round in a really pleasing way. If a black one had been available, I would have bought that; I don\u2019t normally buy white appliances. But in this case, I think the whiteness of it adds to the friendliness of the look. And it\u2019s pleasing in other ways, too; for example, I think this is the first time I\u2019ve ever owned an appliance with a retractable power cord.)<\/p>\r\n
One of the main things that had occurred to me that I could do with a rice cooker was to make burritos. Burritos have always been something that I had made for me, at taquerias or at the deli counter at Piazza\u2019s (the grocery store where I usually shop). But the ingredients that I usually get in burritos are rice and beans and cheese and salsa and lettuce and guacamole. And I always have cheese and salsa on hand at home, and usually some kind of lettuce, and often avocado in some form. So I purchased burrito-sized tortillas, and a bag of Lundberg short-grain brown rice, and a can of black beans, and I made myself a burrito.<\/p>\r\n
And it all went well!<\/p>\r\n
I was disappointed that I still had to rinse the rice (I know that pre-washed rice exists, but that\u2019s not the kind I got), but I was more comfortable with that than I was last time I did it. And I was a little stressed by the rice cooker showing no visible sign of doing anything for most of the time it was running, but there was steam coming out of the vent on the top.<\/p>\r\n
When it was done, the rice was a little too mushy, but that\u2019s because I had put in a little extra water\u2014I like soft rice, so I had intentionally put water in slightly over the appropriate line, under the assumption that the default amount of water would be too little for me.<\/p>\r\n
I heated up the beans. They were a little undersalted to my taste, but fine. (The next day, when I did this again, I added a bit of salt and they were better.)<\/p>\r\n
I warmed a tortilla in my toaster oven, then put some rice and beans and cheese and salsa and lettuce in a little pile in the middle of the tortilla, then did some scrunching around (as I\u2019ve seen burrito-makers do) and folded things over, and voila! I had a homemade burrito!<\/p>\r\n
And I discovered another advantage to making a burrito myself. I quite like the burritos that I buy from various places, but they\u2019re often too big for me to eat in one meal. The Piazza\u2019s ones in particular I tend to cut in half, and have half for dinner one night and half for dinner the next night. So when I was buying tortillas, I got smaller ones; the \u201cburrito-sized\u201d tortillas that I bought are much smaller than the giant-sized ones Piazza\u2019s uses, and the resulting burritos are something I can eat in one meal.<\/p>\r\n
The one that I made was tasty. And I had plenty of everything left over, so I ended up making two more burritos over the next couple days before I ran out of beans and that batch of rice.<\/p>\r\n
During that time, I also had some rice mixed with tomato sauce and cheese and corn and such, which was also tasty.<\/p>\r\n
A day or two later, I made another batch of brown rice with a little less water; that came out better, and I again got a few meals out of it, including a couple of burritos. Good stuff.<\/p>\r\n
So I\u2019m pretty pleased with the whole thing so far. Next up will be more of the same, but I\u2019ll also try making coconut rice\u2014I got some white rice and a can of coconut milk, and I found a recipe for making coconut rice in a rice cooker<\/a>.<\/p>\r\nI\u2019m still unlikely to eat all that much rice, but it\u2019ll be really nice to have on hand when I want it. And I\u2019ll probably make some extra and freeze it at some point so it\u2019ll be available even faster.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-gadgets"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19735,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19733\/revisions\/19735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}