Post Punk Kitchen Forum

So I've decided I should use my slow cooker and rice cooker more often. Right now I only use my slow cooker for basic stuff like simmering beans and making soups, and my rice cooker for making grains and rice (duh). I've heard of people making bread in a rice cooker (warning: link is not vegan but it's an interesting process). This got me thinking, are there other "unusual" ways to use a rice cooker/slow cooker that are totally awesome and I'm just not thinking of? Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

I make pretty much any recipe for pilaf-type dishes in my rice cooker, but my rice cooker has a sauté setting, so that helps.

Guess that's not really non-traditional, but it is helpful for a person who cannot make rice on the stove, no matter what the directions in a recipe say to do.

i make my stuffing for thanksgiving in my rice cooker. it was born of necessity in Japan, but it makes awesome, super moist stuffing.

actually, in japan i heard of many people using their rice cookers for weird things, like spaghetti. when you have a kitchen with one electric hot plate that doesn't really work, you get creative.
some ideas (and a non-vegan pic): http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/dinin ... d=all&_r=0

Yes, that's the type of thing I was thinking of! I had actually heard of the rice-cooker bread thing from friends who had worked in Korea, because I guess ovens aren't as common there as they are in the USA.

The most unconventional thing I ever used my rice cooker for was steel cut oats.

1 c oats
4 c water
soak overnight, then turn it on in the morning.

When we lived in South Asia there was an expat cookbook floating around with recipes for cakes and steamed puddings made in a rice cooker. I had a small oven so I never tried it. I tasted a cake a friend made, and it was alright, but I wouldn't go out of my way to make or eat it.

An ex of mine made spaghetti in a slow cooker once because it was the only clean thing in his kitchen. It turned out suuuuper weird. Like just a giant mass of stuck together noodles that had absorbed all of the sauce. It was kind of like eating wet, tomato-y bread.

I have a basic cheap on/off rice cooker. The directions warn not to use it for anything but rice (cooked in water, not milk) and steamed vegetables. I guess I voided my warranty.

I'm not sure what I cook in the rice cooker is unconventional, but it is forbidden in the manual:

I use it for polenta, because I don't like standing and stirring it for the whole cooking time. I just put 1 cup polenta (160 g) and 3.4 cups water (850 ml) in the dish, turn it on and in few minutes it switches to keep warm. (My cup is 250 ml.)

Pearled barley. Cooked it twice. It cooks it well, but, both times, a lot of water came out and the water collecting container on the side was way too small for it.

Spelt, unsoaked. It cooked it really well in much less time than it would take on the stove.

Bulgur, cooked really well, fluffy.

I love to use my slow cooker to make polenta. I once made chocolate cake in it because it was too hot to turn the oven on. It wasn't the best cake, but it was edible.

I've made chocolate pudding cake and blondies in my slow cooker (I didn't have a working oven at the time, so I was desperate). They both turned out alright. The pudding cake recipe is online (just google it), but the blondies recipe is in The Vegan Slow Cooker.

You can found a lot of good slow cooker recipes there:
http://allrecipes.com/recipes/main-dish/slow-cooker/
And I found it is easy to cook with a slow cooker, so I　decide to find a good slow cooker.
While I search reviews about slow cooker, I found a good slow cooker review site, http://slowcookerblog.com.It also give advice of what size is right for you. Really a good site.

I have a really simple rice cooker, has anyone cooked dried beans in their rice cooker? I would plan on soaking them for 12 hrs, just wondering if anyone has done this and how long it took them to cook.

Cooking beans from raw in a slow cooker is risky business. Of the beans that are toxic raw, several become more toxic if you cook them at too low a temperature (kidney beans, for example). I would be inclined to cook them properly first, then add them. The risk is fairly small, but it has hospitalised people in the past and one should generally avoid cooking foods in ways that pose a significant risks of making you ill.

I've had beany poisoning and it's horrible.

It's not true of every bean, but it's worth checking whether or not the kind you use are suitable for slow cooking.

I cook chickpeas in the slow cooker overnight but never any other kind of bean.

I'm very interested in the rice cooker bread. I wonder if it could work for GF breads.

I'm scared to cook kidney beans from scratch, period. But I have done chickpeas, black beans, and adzuki beans in my slow cooker with success.

I throw caution to the wind I guess, cause slow cooker beans are the easiest way to make them I think. It takes about 3 hours from dried to cooked, no soaking required. If you wash the beans and put a 3X1 ration of beans to water and turn it to high, it seems chickpeas will be soft in about 3.5 hours, most other beans in 3. I didn't know you weren't supposed to cook kidney beans this way, but they seem fine. To be fair, the high setting on my crockpot does get to a low boil.