We've all been there:  It's 6:30 in the morning and you rush downstairs on the way to work when - "d-oh!" - you realise that you forgot to pack your lunch the night before.  Or how about this situation:  Before leaving for your Saturday grocery trip you fill half a garbage bag with all the expired leftovers in your fridge.  Well, you can eliminate both of these scenarios by doing one simple thing: cook rice.

In the west there is a good chance that if you're not asian you probably don't own a rice cooker.  In fact, if you're American you probably eat very little rice at all!  Rice has many redeeming qualities: it's high in fiber, it's very digestible, it's easy to cook, it stores for long periods of time, and it's crazy cheap.  It also keeps well in your fridge and it's neutral flavor makes a great base that can be paired with... well, almost anything!

So you read the "no lunch" scenario and the "wasted food" scenario.  Now here's a new one: Every Sunday you cook a few cups of rice, let it cool and put it in a storage container in your fridge.  When you need to pack a lunch, scoop a cup of cold rice out of your container and hunt in your fridge for leftovers to build yourself a makeshift meal.

One of the problem with leftovers is that often the leftovers are incomplete parts of a previous meal or the portions are too small to constitute a full serving so the food ends up neglected until it rots in your fridge.

Leftovers: One sketchy tomato and a half-eaten hamburger patty.
Action: Dice the good part of the tomato and throw the remainder into your composter.  Chop the burger patty.  Throw on top of your scoop of rice and add a dash of tobasco.  60 seconds in the microwave and you've got lunch.

Leftovers: Four chicken nuggets and a half-cup of vegetable soup.
Action: Chop the nuggets and add the chicken and the soup to your cup of rice.

Leftovers: Half an omelette from breakfast.
Action: Chop the omelette, dump on top of a cup of rice, add some bbq sauce or a scoop of sour cream if you have it.  Poof!

You get the idea?  You can turn pretty much anything into you own custom rice bowl as long as you have a little container of rice handy.  So why not get started this week and make the most of your leftovers?

» Rice Cooker (Wikipedia)