When purchasing kitchen gadgets, I try to only purchase multifunctional items. Avoiding the clutter of a million devices and thingamabobs that do a single task. However, I could not do avoid having a rice cooker. I realize theoretically speaking you can make rice on a stove top. I saw theoretically because I have never successfully cooked rice on the stove top. In fact, I actually ruined a pot by trying to make rice in it. No matter how long we soaked the poor pan, the scalded rice would not release from the bottom. Eventually my husband and I were forced to accept the pot was not salvageable and to the garbage heap it went.

To avoid similar fatalities we started using a rice cooker. It was that or never eat rice again. I don’t recall how the rice cooker came into our home exactly. It either came in with my husband, a throw back from his college kitchen or we purchased it in our early years of living together. Either way, it was purchased on a shoe string budget so it was not the top line of rice cookers. It works, but the rice is never the exact texture. And each time we make rice we say to one another “we really ought to get a nicer rice cooker.” I think what holds us back is the fact that the rice cooker is a unitasker (as Alton Brown calls such things) and so laying down a lot of cash for a nice one seemed a little silly.

Until today! I ran across a post on Apartment Therapy about other things you can make in your rice cooker. Perhaps a new and higher quality rice cooker isn’t so frivolous. After all you can make lots of things in them other than rice. It can even serve as a substitute for a bread maker (another unitasker that I never considered purchasing).

I had thought since many Japanese have rice cookers and the Japanese are masters at making almost anything cute, including bus stops that surly there would be tons of adorable, yet quality rice cookers online. I was wrong. As my husband stated, “Rice cookers are serious business.” I still hold out hope that there are cute rice cookers in the world but it seems for now I am at an impasse.

I am interested in a Zojirushi model. I find it amusing that their site boasts that it is Neuro Fuzzy Logic Technology. Ha! Oh math humor!

I like that it allegedly “thinks” because I know I am not smart enough to make rice (as evidenced by the pot fatality) so perhaps I need a robot to do it for me! Now I just need to save the dough for a new rice robot since they do not come cheap.