Adult Experiments

One of our wedding gifts from our registry was a rice cooker. Some of my friends from college pooled money together and purchased it for us. We used it for the last ten years and it has been a wonderful part of our household cooking preparation. 

In the last month or so, we realized we were cooking rice every single day. Yes, we naturally consume a lot of rice as part of our weekly meals, but having to cook rice everyday was a bit overkill and excessive. Alas, our little 5-cup rice cooker was no longer making do for our growing family. 

We already own an 8 qt Instant Pot and I've blogged about how we love it. This was the concluding post to  tracking my small appliance usage in 2022. One of the features of the Instant Pot is its rice cooker function. We've actually never tried it, but in the past few weeks, we did, because we were wondering if we needed to purchase a new rice cooker. 

We looked up some recipes online about how to cook rice in an instant pot. This recipe was the starting point of our testing. The recipe itself is fine. If followed correctly, it makes great rice. But there was one main issue with this recipe - you have to stop the cooking at a precise time in order to yield the best rice texture. This means the IP will pressurize, cook for 3 minutes, and then naturally release for 10 minutes. In minutes, this means after approximately 33-35 minutes, you will need to return to the IP and release the rest of the pressure. For our household, it's not always possible for me to be at home and available to stop the cooking after 35 minutes. I love the feature about designated rice cookers where you can keep warm in the appliance for days!

My husband and I experimented with this a few times to see if we could play with the proportions. We tried a shorter cooking time (1 minute) and letting it naturally release longer (we tested up to about 2 hours) and with less water in the recipe. All our tests yielded very mushy, soft rice. Although edible and arguably the same taste, the texture just wasn't right. 

So we came to the conclusion that we need an actual specialized rice cooker to cook our rice because it will cook, finish, and keep warm for days if we needed it to, and the texture of the rice is unaffected. 

So much more counter space...but I will sacrifice 
the space for well-cooked non-babysat rice. 😅

 

Luckily, we found this new 10-cup rice cooker for less than $150 at the time we purchased. The current list price has gone up significantly.  Originally we were looking into the Zojirushi brand which always costs around $200. We ended up deciding on the Cuckoo because it seemed comparable in quality at a lower price point. We'll let time tell us if we made the right decision or not. 

Who knew 20 years after high school we'd still be using constants, variables, and reading results in our own way. 😏

Storage 101: The Pantry

This is part 2 of my Storage 101 series. If you missed part 1, you can catch up here.

Disclosure: I'm not about the beautiful Instagram-worthy photos. I'm about real life and telling it/showing it like it is. Take it or leave it. 

There's a house one street over from our house which we put an offer on when we were buying houses. At the time, I really wanted that house for two main reasons: 

1. It had a walk-in pantry.
2. It had a utility room sink.

Not having a utility room sink doesn't affect me much after all. Washing paint brushes in a bathroom sink isn't ideal, but at the end of the day, having running water in a basin is pretty much all the same. Not having a walk-in pantry on the other hand has often made me sigh.

Our pantry, although not a walk-in, has space. It's two sets of cabinets, one on top of the other. In total, we have less than 40 cubic ft of space. After having kids, our pantry was starting to look disheveled with all the snacks and cereal boxes piling up on top of each other.

This was our pantry before I went through and redid it.

By no means is this on the extreme messy spectrum. However, it could have been much better.

One problem we've always had is not being able to see things in the back of the pantry. The space itself is quite deep which is a good and bad thing. Good: it can store a decent amount of stuff. Bad: you can't see it all. Unfortunately, the solution is to not use about 9 cubic feet in order to maintain visibility throughout the space. So if you do the math, that only leaves approximately 30 cubic feet of usable pantry space. That's a little larger than the size of an average refrigerator in 2021. 

I took my storage inspiration from The Home Edit and used clear storage bins to organize our pantry. We bought wide and narrow containers and mixed and matched as needed. It just happened to work where two rows of shelving were the same height as the bins so we could maximize the space.

I had a lot of fun unpacking our entire pantry and rearranging/reorganizing the space. I also followed the rules where most used items are accessible at lower parts of the pantry and/or kept in the front of the space. I tried to move as much of the unused items to the top of the pantry and in the back of the shelves. To be honest, we just need to get rid of more things, but I can't bring myself to yet and we can still afford to store it without creating a mess. Taking from Marie Kondo here in not having to trash everything but simply keeping them stored well. 

Simply more joyful to look at.

After organizing the top half of our pantry, I decided to tackle the bottom half as well. This space is where we store larger pantry items as well as the "value size" refills for various items: cooking oil, rice, bulk cereal, etc. 

A big part of utilizing the space well was removing our paper towels. I'm not going to lie. We had over 12 rolls of paper towels stored under there. When we were a married couple without kids, this worked okay. Now with two kids and a lot of snacks, we needed the space. 

One afternoon, we spontaneously came up with the idea to reuse an old organizer I bought while in college and hang it in the garage to store lightweight paper items, ie: bulk paper towels.

I covered up one of my garage masterpieces, but I'm okay with that.
And no, we did not hoard paper towels. I bought one bulk pack back in 2019.
In February of 2020, I used a free coupon to get another bulk pack because
that's when the coupon was expiring. We use paper towels really slowly.
None of this was related to Covid.

This freed up SO much space. 

As far as organization, I knew I wanted to keep half of the space tall to store our 50 lb bag of rice* and stackable boxed goods. The other half, I wanted some shelving to store round jars and other shaped containers. Originally, I reused old diaper boxes turned on their side to create grid boxes so I could map out what kind of shelving I wanted. This worked out so well I ended up keeping them permanently. Diaper boxes are really sturdy. 

Our lower pantry. 

*Fun fact: Between my husband, my daughter, and myself, we ate over 100 pounds of rice in 2020. 

The storage bins for our pantry reorganization did cost quite a bit, but everything has a designated bin and it has stayed relatively organized. Even three months after our initial cleaning and reorganizing, everything has generally stayed neat and tidy.

We even replaced the batteries in our puck lights so we can see into it at night!

This is how our pantry looks like 3 months after the initial reorganization.
Everything has generally been maintained. No, this is not a staged photo.
It was taken one morning before the kids woke up on a whim.

Maintenance is a key aspect of organization which often gets overlooked. Sure, it may look prim, proper, and clean upon its initial organization, but the true test is whether or not you can maintain it. Our pantry? Yeah, it's definitely been maintained which proves two things:

1. The organization system works.

2. Everything actually has a place.

Next time: Drawer Tetris