Min-maxing dinner

Rice is great

Rice is one of the most popular staple foods in the world for good reason. I’ll admit that I wasn’t thrilled with it when I was younger—unless it was fried rice. But rice can be great when paired with sauces or flavorful foods.

The real trick in my opinion is that rice doesn’t need to be cooked plain. I’ve recently started sprinkling my rice with instant soup mix and a bunch of dried spices before cooking it, and it’s a game changer.

If you’re worried about health, I suppose you can eat brown rice, but I still prefer white rice for flavor. More expensive Zojirushi cookers have a “GABA brown” mode that makes brown rice taste a lot better. But you’ll have to wait almost 2.5 hours for this cook mode to complete! Sheesh.

Zojirushi makes rice taste amazing

Yeah, I’ve made rice by hand before, but it’s never come out nearly as good as Zojirushi rice. I’ve only messed up the rice a handful of times with my Zojirushi cooker, and I’m pretty sure every time it boiled down to putting in too much water. The “set it and forget it” nature of Zojirushi rice cookers mean that even though the umami setting takes around 72 minutes, I don’t have to do any work after it starts cooking. All you have to do is fluff the rice after it’s done, and then it can safely sit for the whole rest of the day in the “keep warm” mode.

Giant pancake

After making regular pancake batter, spray the Zojirushi cooking pot with PAM cooking spray and turn it on regular white rice mode. The magic sensors take care of everything from there. When it’s done, you’ll have one massive thick pancake the size of, well, a cake. You can slice it up and eat it however you want. Syrup is great, but I think this style pairs perfectly with jam.

Easy rice dinner

I like to cook this with basmati rice, but you can use whatever kind you like. After putting the rice and water in the bowl, sprinkle instant soup powder and all the dried herbs and spices you like. I generally go for a massive pour of cumin, because it has such a lovely flavor. I can’t eat beans due to my IBS, but cumin is a key ingredient in cooked beans, so it helps my brain think about Mexican food I could be enjoying if only my digestive system would cooperate. After that, I usually do turmeric (for color), ancho chile powder, paprika, and some green herbs like sage or oregano. If you don’t know what to use, just buy a spice blend that sounds tasty. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

The final step before pressing “Start” is to load the bowl with a bunch of frozen vegetables. Eating a huge bowl of rice for dinner isn’t going to wow a nutritionist, but when half of it is green beans, peas, carrots, and corn, I think it looks a bit more balanced :) Remember that your rice is just steaming in there, so any frozen vegetables should be fine to toss in. Just note that less hearty vegetables (like lettuce) will get absolutely destroyed by the long steaming process, so you’ll want to stick to heartier vegetables here.

For some protein, I suggest topping this with sliced almonds, crumbled cheese, or some other prepped meat of your choice.

Soup!

I used to not really like soup. It probably didn’t help that most soup base is loaded with onion, which upsets my stomach. Since learning more about my food triggers, I’ve started buying instant soup mixes from Fody, which don’t contain onion or garlic. One of my favorite soups to make is just chicken noodle soup… with no noodles.

I get my Dutch oven ready with instant soup mix, then toss in prepped carrots, celery, and frozen chicken. Let everything simmer long enough and you have soup. So, about the noodles: I prefer to pour my soup over a bowl of rice instead! You should store the rice separately from the soup for best results. But I often heat up rice and soup in the same bowl so that the rice absorbs some soup when reheating, which hydrates it and infuses some lovely flavor.

Boiled chicken isn’t gross

Boiling chicken might sound disgusting, but it’s actually one of the easiest ways to cook chicken without making it tough and dry. What I like to do here is cook my frozen chicken breast in a minimal amount of liquid that’s heavily seasoned: spices, herbs, instant soup mix, salt, pepper, whatever sounds good. I love fennel seeds in this too because fennel seeds become chewy and delicious when boiled. Actually, they go wonderfully in rice too for this reason.

So you can simmer the chicken when you’re not in the room, or bring it to a full boil while keeping an eye on it. I like to simmer for a while then finish on a full boil and keep the lid off so I can reduce the liquid into a concentrated soup/sauce. You can store this liquid and pour it over rice along with the chicken, and use it as a reheating liquid for the chicken.

If you do everything like this, all of the flavor in all the ingredients ends up in your mouth! There’s no waste, just taste.

Also, if you like BBQ pulled chicken, you can just shred the chicken with two forks when you’re done and add sauce later. This is a great way to prep a bunch of chicken at once.

Why a Dutch oven instead of a Crock Pot

There’s nothing wrong with a Crock Pot, but it’s just less versatile than having a Dutch oven. A Dutch oven can go inside your regular oven, it can be heated up nice and hot to sear a roast before broiling it, and it doesn’t take up counter space! Just put it on your stove, which is already sitting there in your kitchen.

Intuitive cooking

I can’t stand recipes. It’s not that I never use them, but I feel like they cause me more problems than they solve. At the very least, they cause me to second guess myself. Surely the talented cook who wrote them wouldn’t lead me astray. But alas, recipes are hard to write. Just like programs assume things about their execution environment, so do recipes about the exact details of the weather, the ingredients, and the methods.

Nobody wants to sit there looking at a recipe while making dinner, especially when they’re freaking hungry and just want to eat something. There’s something beautiful about following your nose and your taste when cooking. Building that muscle memory and connecting those neurons together so that you can experiment and truly understand what your doing. You absolutely have to “fuck around and find out” to build your knowledge of what’s good.

Knowing how “wet” a dough should be when making biscuits is critically important compared to reading an ingredient list and just uncritically following it. I’ve saved many biscuits from a soggy fate by adding milk by eye and observing the dough rather than putting faith in numbers that don’t reliably reproduce results across different climates and circumstances.

Tell me about your kitchen tips!

I love cooking food, but it can get exhausting having to feed myself three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Send me your tips on how to make simple, delicious, nutritious food.