alt Hacker NewsEmbrace asynchronous cooking with a rice cooker. Maybe you can cook rice in a pot, maybe you can't, but you definitely can't do it while you're busy working or when you're out of the house. It cooks the rice and waits for when you're ready.
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schemathings • today at 1:16 AM
One of my lazy recipes is
Sweet potato in rice cooker pot
Filet of Tuna/Salmon/Chicken breast in steam basket
Also some veg like cauliflower/brocolli Kale/Spinach in steam basket
Add 1 cup water, press quick cook/steam.
Season stuff after.
Easy cleanup - nonstick pot.
XorNot • today at 12:46 AM
Seriously. Add a pressure cooker in here too: you can put the rice cooker on, then chop and prepare your pressure cooker items, put that on for 20 minutes and then it basically all finishes at the same time.
In my opinion this is one of the under-rated advantages of sous vide. Most proteins have a very wide range of time in which they are appropriately cooked; often between 1 and 4 hours. Having the meat be ready to go, with at most a few minutes of searing time, at any point in a couple of hour window is really convenient.
Our go-to "we didn't plan a meal tonight" is to pull an already-seasoned-in-the-sous-vide bag chicken breast out of the freezer, throw some rice in the rice cooker (I agree with the original point about rice cookers), and microwave some frozen vegetables.
It's a pretty well balanced (if somewhat unexciting) meal that takes ~10-15 minutes of active work, is extremely flexible on timing, and has pretty minimal cleanup.
It does take a few different levels of prep though:
Packaging the chicken breasts (and having the freezer space to store them), and then realizing you are going to make this meal at least 2 hours, preferably 3, beforehand to start the sous vide