Eating whole grains is almost always a win for both health and ecology. Even though our grains travel from either the mid US region or from California, they still rate higher than most other food choices. Some other advantages are low cost and easy long term storage.
With rice we found a solar cooker works well in the summer. In the winter we tried using the wood stove but kept running into problems. Brown rice is easy to scorch and timing is critical for great rice. This has presented a problem until last week. The solution came from Japan and is an example of technology used to our advantage. What we need is a computer to monitor the rice and use the minimum amount of energy to cook it. It needs to be cooked in a insulated area to conserve heat. It needs to stop cooking when the water has been absorbed and the temperature starts to rise. This simple strategy also works for other grains and the basic technology can be used for soups and stews. Anyway, these cookers have been in our local Asian grocery for a long time but the instructions and controls were not in English. This has now changed and it is possible to find them with some English. They are called fuzzy logic cookers. Now we can cook perfect brown rice and do something else at the same time. My only regret is wasting money and time on the standard rice cookers found in most US appliance stores. All of them got warm on the outside (heat loss) and scorched brown rice. None had a useful timer function or were as versatile. jeff
