Another 'Oh DUH' moment

I recently had a duh moment while cooking dinner. I've owned my rice cooker (aka RiceBot) for many years--it was a present from my mom, and I've used it for every Chinese/Japanese rice meal that I've made since (for short-grain rice). It's really good actually--it has a slow or fast cook mode (depending on how much time you have); you can set it up on a timer; and it keeps the rice warm after cooking. It even has incredibly clever features like a retractable cord reel, a lid that collects condensate into a drainable reservoir, and a holder for the rice paddle. It's shaped like a spare brain carrying case.

Incidentally, I ran across an amusing web page mocking lower-end rice cookers, with descriptions like, "The glass-lid style of rice cooker you see at left, which we estimate as 95% of what you'll find in American stores, is practically an ancient relic throughout Asia. These cookers are a bit cheaper, but they don't have a proper ventilation system to capture and maintain moisture, so unless you serve the rice immediately after it's cooked it dries out."

But back to my story: it only occurred to me now that I could use RiceBot to cook other types (e.g., basmati). That's what I did while making dinner tonight. Yeah, it works really well. Duh.

Tonight's dinner, incidentally, was chicken madras (from a sauce mix), and cauliflower with potatoes (phool gobi aur aloo ki bhaji, from Madhur Jaffrey's cookbook).

In other news, stress levels are not as bad as I thought they would be. My prof said over lunch, "We're cancelling class next week, so why don't you present your work to date in class today?" (yeah, stress level spike), but it went just fine. Also, the hundreds of sensors we need for this trip are well underway--a result of spending Sunday to midnight in the lab. While assembling sensors, I remarked to my coworkers, "Shit... there must be a sweatshop somewhere that we could exploit for this friggin' work." Then I looked around at my surroundings: windowless lab space, no fire escape, a bunch of poorly-paid grad students hunched over soldering irons doing piece-work. Hmmm...

Anyway, happy 2/22!