Rice Cooker Stars in Pantry Meals

By David Hu

Last week was Pantry Week on Special Fork and I shared some of my favorite tips and tricks for what to stock in your pantry. One thing I didn’t mention is my trusty rice cooker. A rice cooker is key to effectively using rice, a go-to pantry staple, since it cooks your rice for you while you make the rest of the meal.

So with that in mind, we’ve been running a Zojirushi rice cooker sweepstakes than ends this week (Sunday Oct 21, 2012). It’s not too late to get in on the action. Click here to enter.

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What’s in your Pantry?

By Sandy Hu

All this week, Special Fork bloggers are revealing what’s in their pantry, with tips for using pantry staples. To celebrate Pantry Week, Special Fork has teamed up with Zojirushi, the Japanese maker of top-quality kitchen appliances, to offer a fabulous sweepstakes prize: the 5.5-cup capacity Zojirushi Micom Rice Cooker & Warmer ($192 MSRP), which not only cooks rice flawlessly, but also steams foods and bakes cakes. Menu settings include: white/sushi, mixed, porridge, sweet, brown, cake, steam and quick cooking. Enter to win!

Around 3 or 4 p.m. PST weekdays, I cruise Twitter looking for people who “dk (don’t know) what to cook” and try to give them answers, tweeting as @specialforksndy.  Problem is, without a well-stocked pantry, it’s hard to act upon my Twitter suggestions, no matter how quick and easy the ideas.

Here are some of the staples I keep on hand so I can always make dinner, even if I haven’t gone to the supermarket. I’m not including the obvious: canned tomato products, chicken broth, pastas and other standards.

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Brown Bag a Bento Lunch

By Sandy Hu

When Steve and I go on vacation, we love to poke around in local farmers’ markets and explore supermarkets to check out what the locals are eating. Our suitcases on the return home are always bulging with cans and boxes of transportable food, a few new cookbooks and some food magazines . We try to make our vacation last a little longer by replicating some of the dishes we enjoyed.

During our first trip to Japan in May, we fell in love with o-bento lunches (Japanese box lunches, artfully arranged in partitioned containers).We can buy them easily from Japanese markets in San Francisco of course, but in Japan, we could purchase them everywhere and in great variety. Whether from the fabulous food emporia found in the basement of every high-end department store, to train station kiosks and even the 7-11, o-bento lunches were uniformly tasty.

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Make an Easy, One-Skillet Meal

By David Hu

Here’s a recipe that’s especially welcome on nights when you just don’t feel like cooking. Meat, veggies and rice come together in one skillet, so dinner is an efficient, one-dish meal. You do have to cook some rice first, however, but if you have a rice cooker, it’s a simple matter to measure out the rice and water in the pot, turn it on and come back to it when the rice is done.

Ground beef or lamb, green pepper and eggplant are an especially delicious combination of Mediterranean flavors. Quick, easy and hearty, this is a great dish for a brisk fall day.

To get the recipe and shopping list on your smartphone (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android device) or PC, click here.

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Hot-Cooked Rice? So nice!

By Sandy Hu

You might think that rice is in my blood, in my veins. But you would be wrong.

As a kid, I was a mashed potatoes girl. And it’s only as I developed an appreciation of food and cooking that I learned to appreciate rice – the firm little morsels with just a little bite, that when chewed slowly, develop a sweetness that fills the mouth with flavor.

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