For those hankering after good home-cooked food, all they need to do is invest in a rice cooker, says Pauline D Loh

When I was part of the student population in Berkeley a different age ago, the most memorable hardships were the constant lack of money and missing the comfort foods of home. Burgers and chips adequately filled us for about the first three months, and then one day, we woke up with an intense longing for a large bowl of simple, steamed white rice.

The dormitory I shared with some fellow Asians were full of students on scholarships and bursaries - which meant most of us were on tight shoestring budgets that allowed no luxuries. But one of the smartest things we did was to invest in a large rice cooker for the common kitchen.

It was a single pot cooking station that gave us many satisfying meals of rice, noodles, soups, steamed meats and even cakes! Since I was the only one with some rudimentary kitchen skills, I became the designated cook.

One of the first dishes I made was a steamed chicken rice modeled after the Hainanese chicken rice of my native Singapore. There were several hits and misses, mainly because Asian chickens were mostly sold whole, and the American fowls from the supermarkets came cut up in pieces. Asian chickens were also younger and more tender while the US birds were larger and tougher. (I now understood why my American friends cooked their chickens for two hours in the oven.)

Finally, I found my whole young chicken with head and feet from San Francisco's Chinatown, and hugging my trophy bird to my chest, I started back across the Bridge to cook my chicken rice.

Enough to say that our apartment became the center of attraction as soon as the chicken started releasing its wonderful fragrance in the rice cooker.

This has become my favorite rice cooker recipe, and stayed with me through the years. It has also found its way into my various cookbooks and I know it's a resounding success from the feedback I get.

It's a simple two-step process. First, the cleaned chicken is thoroughly rubbed with salt and stuffed with the Chinese cook's trinity of ginger, scallions and garlic. This goes into the rice cooker with a large soup bowl of water.

Once cooked, the chicken is drained and lifted from the rice-cooker. The cooking liquid is then used to cook the rice, topped with the garlic, ginger and scallions left over from cooking the chicken.

The cooled chicken is then cut-up, Chinese-style, and set on a plate. When the rice is cooked, it's time to eat. Normally, a chili garlic dip and a ginger scallion dip accompany the chicken, together with a plate of thick, sweet dark soy sauce.

The whole process took about 45 minutes, half of which was cooking time and it was always a feast. Best of all, we had no messy stoves to clean up, just a well-used rice cooker.

Other dishes we made in the rice cooker included savory rice using Chinese sausages and yam. This one was even simpler.

Chinese sausages or preserved meat or even ham were cut up and diced. Yam or pumpkin were also diced and tossed in a mixture of cornstarch and five-spice powder. The cubed ingredients were then set aside while the rice cooked. When the surface water had evaporated, these were tipped on top of the rice to cook.

Fifteen minutes later, we had a delicious savory rice of yam and sausages and minimum washing up.

If we wanted just plain steamed rice, the rice cooker became a one-stop pot once more. A plate of marinated meat or fish would be placed on a rack on top of the raw rice. Once the rice cooker was started, it cooked the rice and steamed the food at the same time.

These days, of course, I have a much better equipped kitchen with stoves and oven and the rest of the essential paraphernalia, but occasionally, when my husband and son are away at work, I still fall back on my rice cooker for an easy meal.

Here are a few recipes for your rice cooker. In some, you can actually vary the ingredients for an infinite repertoire of easy dishes. Besides, steaming is one of the healthiest ways to cook.

(China Daily 05/29/2010 page12)