@troubleMoney also, what happens if you forget and leave it there for half an hour?

@InspectorCaracal if you forget about it it'll go really mushy and not particularly nice but still edible

@InspectorCaracal we use the easy cook stuff, you can probably find it in your supermarket somewhere

@troubleMoney Ohhhhh, this isn't just a general rice cooking thing, then.

@InspectorCaracal I'm pretty sure it works with the non-easy cook stuff, but I'm not entirely sure as easy cook is the variety that's cheapest and most common over here

@InspectorCaracal I think the easy cook just has stuff done to it to reduce stickyness

@troubleMoney hrm, well generally I'm going for "really hard to fuck up" more than "fast", so I'm not sure the reduction of half an hour to ten minutes is worth the risk of turning your rice to goo

@InspectorCaracal I personally veer towards "just put it on for x minutes and have an alarm or something" rather than "keep an eye on it until it's cooked" but I guess it depends on which particular variety of spoons you have

@troubleMoney Getting the times to match up for preparing different parts of a meal is one of the hardest parts and is why I always take like twice as long as the directions suggest the first time I try a recipe. >.> Things that can just sit there for a bit while I'm busy doing a different thing are extremely valuable to me.

@InspectorCaracal ah, personally I need to get everything ready at the start then have to put down times for everything and follow that exactly to minimise spoons usage, not at all good at parallel processing when I'm tired

or at all for that matter, but especially when I'm tired I need to serialise everything

@troubleMoney That's actually pretty similar to what I do, which is why they take so much longer. The recipes say "do this while you're doing this" and I can't.

But spending 5 minutes to get the rice started at the beginning and then leaving it there on low while I go through all the rest of it is easy, requires no attention to the rice, and means the rice is still hot and freshly cooked at the end.

@troubleMoney Bonus point: since I use rice as a base, if something that was "supposed" to be made simultaneous to something else was sitting there for a while and cooled somewhat, it warms up nicely when served over hot rice.

@InspectorCaracal what I've found helps is I always rearrange the instructions so that anything that can be done ahead of time like cutting things up or measuring things out I do at the start then I can think "right, this takes 10 minutes to cook, this takes 20, then combine, so at t-20 put in the thing, then t-10 put in the thing, then at t combine"

@troubleMoney Yeah that's, uh, that's the part I'm bad at. 😅

I usually have to try a couple times and wind up frantically juggling things and burning the sauce before I figure out the timing I need to use.

@InspectorCaracal heh, yeah

I do the experimenting on good spoons days so on the bad days I can just go from the notebook

@troubleMoney good idea!!

@InspectorCaracal oh actually, apparently the easy cook stuff takes slightly longer than the non-easy cook stuff, so adjust the time down a bit and that tip'll still work