Rice Cooker Soup Adventure!

Edit: Since this post was published, I have made much better soups in my rice cooker. Almost anything I can make in a pot over a stove (noodle mixes, for example) I can make in the rice cooker with very few adjustments - perhaps a bit more time, since the temp is a bit lower. You might also be pleasantly surprised if, in a pinch, you try using your rice cooker in the capacity of a very small skillet. I've cooked eggs and mushrooms and chicken breasts in mine.

Back to the original post:

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I dropped my meal plan down to seven. This means it's time for me to get SERIOUS about dorm room cooking. My meal plan was previously 10 a week, and I do just fine on two meals a day (lots of snacks ;), so generally it would work out just right so that I'd eat out or cook something small for four meals a week. But seven meals is a bit harder. So I thought I'd experiment with the possibilities of a rice cooker. I've heard you could cook soup in them, and the other day I bought some campbells chicken noodle soup. Still, online I only found 'rice cooker soup' recipes, as if there is some magical formula to making a soup well in a rice cooker. And nowhere did anyone mention having prepared canned soup in a rice cooker.

Well, I was about to change that. :D But then I decided that I've always wanted to put rice in my chicken noodle soup, and when using a rice cooker seemed like the perfect time to try that. So first I cooked some really short grained Arabic rice.



While that was cooking I got really sad, imagining the vegetable free final product. A lot of people think I don't like fruits and vegetables. This is because I am allergic to most of them in their raw form. But vegetables cooked... as in soups... are definitely my friends. I had an intense longing for carrots. I don't happen to have any carrots lying around, (hopefully remedied by my next trip to a proper grocery store), but I do have a few cans of tomatoes (w/ basil). Better than nothing, right? :)

Right. Then I added the soup, and, because I evidently am a very hyper cook, some garlic and some Mrs. Dash, which I bought yesterday on a whim and haven't ever used before.

Nom nom nom!! :D For me, this is about 6-8 servings. Perhaps 2-4 for an ordinary person? XD I really don't know. And the whole thing was pretty easy, low maintenance, and cost about 3$.