Cooking with water

Back in college, one of my prized possessions was my rice cooker. We weren't, technically, supposed to have any cooking type things in our dorm rooms, but that didn't stop my roommate Sam and I from accumulating enough to have our own little kitchen beneath our beds. Along with the rice cooker, we also had a coffee maker, a plug-in kettle, a toaster oven, and not one, but two mini fridges. We didn't have a microwave, but there were enough people around who did, and there was also one in the kitchen in the lounge. Incidentally, once I burned a bag of popcorn in the kitchen microwave and then stood beneath the fire alarm. Two minutes later, campus security -- which could never be found when actual crimes were going on, such as who was actually responsible for the weekly smashing of the front lounge windows -- were circling my bag of popcorn with suspicion.

The rice-cooker, I learned, didn't just cook rice. If you were patient enough, you could also boil a can of soup or make spaghetti. This was very convenient in casa Seema and Sam, as going down to the kitchen with an armful of pots and pans was a pain. My usual MO was to put the soup in the rice cooker, run off and take a shower, and by the time I came back, 30 minutes later, it was usually done. The pasta would take longer -- maybe 30 to 40 minutes to boil -- but still, it was so much better than say, DC food.

That being said, as much as I loved my rice cooker, there's no way I could possibly talk about them for two hours. Yet another reason to fear Fidel Castro.