Japanese Twitter chefs fall in love with a hassle-free way to make an entire meal with only about a minute of work.

The “rice cooker” is simultaneously both the most and least accurately named appliance in your kitchen. Yes, it absolutely will cook rice, but on the other hand, plain white rice is only the beginning of what you can make in it.

So today, let’s take a look at how you can whip up an entire meaty meal in your rice cooker, and with a mere minute or so of active prep work required.

The recipe comes from Zen-Noh, the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations within the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives Group (so you can see why they call themselves just “Zen-Noh,” literally “All Agriculture,” instead). It’s incredibly simple, and you only need three ingredients:
● Rice
● One onion
● As much bacon as you want to eat

Step 1: Wash the rice and let it sit for 30 minutes.
Step 2: Peel the onion, slice it vertically, and place the slices atop the rice in the rice cooker’s pot.
Step 3: Slice the bacon and toss it in.
Step 4: Start the rice cooker’s process and cook the rice as you normally would.

It generally takes about 30 minutes or so for a rice cooker to go through its cycle, and when it’s done…

…you’ll have a delicious hearty and hot meal ready and waiting!

Cooking the onion in this way makes it tender and sweet, and a few stirs with your rice scoop should have its layers flaking delicately away, giving you a nice mix of the three ingredients as you transfer them to your bowl or plate. Plus, since rice cookers have an automatic keep-warm function, you can toss everything in and start cooking whenever you have a few free moments, then eat whenever you feel like it, without having to watch a pot or turn off a flame.

https://twitter.com/kotoratomozou/status/1356927970531713028

But the real beauty of the recipe is how flexible it is. Zen-Noh itself got the creative ball rolling by mentioning that you can easily swap sausage for the bacon, and other Twitter chefs were quick to offer their own clever additions and substitutions, such as using brown rice instead of white, adding seasonings such as garlic, shirodashi soy/bonito stock, chicken broth, and butter, or simply tossing in two onions for a stronger flavor, if your rice cooker can fit them.

You could even do a meatless version with just the rice and onion, if you’re living a vegetarian lifestyle, or just happen to already have your meal’s carnivorous culinary content covered.

https://twitter.com/nagoyakorekiyo/status/1355718108724424714

So thanks, Zen-Noh! We know just what to make the next time we’re hungry, even if it means we’ll have to make our green tea rice cooker dessert pancakes on a different day.

Source: Twitter/@zennoh_food via IT Media
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where yes, he is incredibly hungry now.