Contest Closed
I take pride in cooking delicious, healthful meals for my family. But let’s face it – when time is a factor I can easily fall short in both categories. The other day I tweeted about my dinner fail, frozen pizza. The very next day, I felt the need to step it up and cook a quality meal. So naturally, I pulled out the Aroma Sauté-Then-Simmer™ Rice Cooker to cook our dinner. It was time to give this a try.
That’s right, I said dinner. This cooker does more than just rice. Of course it will do just rice, but this is no ordinary rice cooker. While flipping through the instructional manual, I found the recipe for Monterey Green Chile Chicken Wraps. Tex-Mex a favorite of mine, the recipe was low in fat and I had the ingredients. That spells dinner!
The Sauté-Then-Simmer™ Technology does just what it says, it cooks the food on a high setting as you would with a sauté pan and then simmers like a slow cooker. I found it to be a huge time saver. Once I added the broth, chicken and rice along with a few other ingredients, I had 25 minutes to go until dinner was just about done.
While our meal was on autopilot, I used the Aroma Electric Mandoline Slicer to prep my cheddar (we didn’t have monterey on hand). There is a grater attachment for the device which turned my brick of cheddar into shredded cheddar in seconds. This was nice. I usually will pay more if I have to for shredded cheese but now I don’t have to. I’ve been wanting a mandoline slicer for years, and I’m glad I held out for this one. Electric is the way to go – my arms do enough work every day!
After my 25 minutes passed, it was time to check the meat for doneness and add the sour cream and spices, and stack on the steamer tray filled with soft taco shells. This steamed the shells to perfection and everything was ready to be eaten 5 minutes later. It smelled great. It tasted great. But I did manage to burn some of the rice at the bottom. But—and don’t tell anyone this—I like burnt rice. Am I strange?
I can’t wait to try some of the other recipes and to experiment with this device on my own. The steamer tray will cook meat and vegetables while the rice cooks. Usually, you will have to add the meat/veggies when the rice is half done to make sure everything is done at the same time.
The Saute-Then-Simmer Rice Cooker, is available nationwide in Target stores for $29.99 and the Electric Mandoline Slicer is currently available in select Sam’s Club locations for $39.88.
