To treat my midlife crisis: A shiny red ... pot?

The old rice cooker that I have used for a few years is showing its age.  The nonstick surface has quite a few scratches; the muscle memory worries about potential carcinogenic effects of the chemical that makes the nonstick surface.

As a kid, when we went to spend summers with the grandmothers, their kitchens had wood-fired stoves, and rice was cooked the traditional way.  A huge pot of rice over flames that were fueled by firewood or coal.  When the starchy water started bubbling over, they knew how to lower the heat by adjusting the wood or coal.  The kitchen was not a fun place to hang out, with all the smoke and heat and sweat.

Then came the pressure cooker for rice and daal and vegetables.  Even my grandmother started using a pressure cooker!

When my mother and grandmothers and aunts cooked rice, boy did the starch stick everywhere.  The empty dishes were then left to soak in water for a while in order to make cleaning easy.

The real advantage of the nonstick surface was not in cooking rice but in preparing all those tasty dishes.  Not having to worry whether stuff was getting caught and burnt in the bottom was a great relief.

But, that advantage meant that we dealt a chemical that was unnatural.  Synthetic.  The tradeoffs that we engage with!

It simply amazes me how technologists and entrepreneurs come up with better and easier and inexpensive gadgets like the electronic rice cooker, which, in addition to making everyday living a lot less complicated, make life that much more exciting. 

Without a rice cooker and nonstick cookware, I doubt I would  have ever experimented in the kitchen.  Tasty experiments like how I once added dried cranberries to the my version of a rice pilaf, much to the displeasure of a visiting cousin :)

To continue experimenting, it was time to replace the old rice cooker.  

A click on the website is all it took for the new stainless steel--no Teflon coating--rice cooker to arrive on the front porch.

In such a short time frame that my life has been thus far, I have gone from witnessing wood-fired stoves and traditional cooking, to using cranberries, which I had not seen nor tasted in the old country, while cooking with a digital rice cooker.