I don't rinse my rice, but I do cook it in copious amounts of water. Just less fussy, for me. I don't have a problem straining it either. I have several..cough..colanders, but my vintage tupperware colanders holes are small enough for rice not to get stuck much and it's not currently in circulation in my kitchen but the old star pattern colanders holes are small enough for most anything too. Modern colanders got too lazy I think and just whacked large holes in them. Smiles. Can't wait for an extra fifteen seconds for things to drain properly. Here is a link that might be useful: Tupperware Colander and she has star pattern ones too. I might need some of her stuff. LOL

I have several and all of my family members have them too, being Cajun we eat a LOT of rice so having the rice cooker comes in very handy, and frees up one more burner and pot for all those big meals. Can I cook perfect rice with out it, I sure can so can all my family, it is one of the first things we learn LOL but do I love my rice cookers I sure do and use them almost daily. They do so many things besides cook rice, if you do a search for rice cooker cookbooks you will be amazed and they are good recipes. Most of the ones I now own are Aroma brand I also have a couple of the microwave type and like those too, they are especially handy for steaming veggies. but they work equally well at cooking rice. I appreciate technology and consider the rice cooker a nice step.

I have been without a kitchen for 5 months already, and we have been lucky because it really has not been bad at all. I live in a very old house, and we had a small sitting room at the top of our stairs on the second floor, where we had built in bookcases. It is not really a separate room, per se. It is almost like a very wide hallway between all the bedrooms, and it has a fireplace and two bright windows, and built in floor to ceiling bookcases. So we moved the loveseat out from that small area, and it was just big enough for a kitchen table. We rearranged the books to clear up a couple of shelves for paper plates, cereal, etc. We also used the fireplace mantel for storage. We cleared an area at the top of the stairs for a small refrigerator, and a small cabinet that had been in the basement. We still have our full size fridge/freezer downstairs, but wanted a small fridge nearby for essentials. We put a microwave and a two burner unit on the top of the cabinet. The toaster is on the bookcase. The only thing we really miss a LOT is the sink. So we mostly use paper everything, and wash what we must in our bathroom sinks, which are too small. It is a pain. I highly recommend finding a place to set up your kitchen table somewhere in the house, even if it is in the basement. I think we would be going crazy if we had to eat on coffee tables, etc. And if you can set up far away from where the work is being done, as we did, that is even better. We stored our kitchen stuff mostly in brown boxes in our dining room and in another small parlour on the first floor. We shoved a lot of stuff into our china cabinet, too. We can access things if we need to. And we can still eat at our dining room table if we have a lot of people over. It has not been that big a deal at all. My house looks like hell, but we can cook almost anything we need to between the burners, microwave and toaster oven. We can still sit at the table in a civilized way. In fact, I'm going to miss having my kitchen on the same floor as my bedroom. It is so much easier getting ready for work in the morning, not running up and down the stairs all the time. Don't forget to keep plastic containers handy, and real knives, and a few large bowls. Aluminum foil and plastic bags also. I never dreamed it would be five months later with no kitchen, and I'm very glad we went through the trouble of moving furniture around to accommodate an almost real kitchen.

I got tired of throwing out wrecked nonstick pans about 15 years ago and bought a cast iron skillet. Very frequent use ever since then, and I've lived in places with electric cooktops and now have a glass smoothtop, and no damage yet, even though I can be pretty klutzy at times and also don't have normal strength in my hands. That said, my cast iron is only a 9" and I have a larger All Clad stainless pan for larger sautes and stir frying, so I don't know how I'd do with a bigger, more heavy cast iron pan. You don't have to keep a cast iron pan completely away from any touch of detergent, but then again, you don't need detergent to get it clean. What germs do people think are living on there after the thing's been heated on the stove?? My preferred method of cleaning is with a stiff *natural* bristled brush and hot water, and then bung it in the oven with a little oil on it and heat it briefly to dry. Works best if you do it while the cast iron is still a little warm, which it will be if you just leave it in the sink while you eat. It can be a little hard to find the right kind of brush, since so many dishwashing brushes are plastic (ugh), but I believe Lodge sells a brush at what is probably a healthy price. I get my natural bristled dish brushes at a Vietnamese market for 99 cents each or so. There are a number of folks on Youtube with videos demonstrating how to take a new, rough-surfaced cast iron pan of the Lodge type, sand down the surface with a power sander and then re-season the whole thing, and you get a glassy smooth surface like the vintage cast iron pans have. That's a little too much heavy work for me, though. Via Youtube I also discovered a new brand of cast iron skillet called "Stargazer," which was originally a Kickstarter project, they say, and manufactured by the old methods creating a smooth surface. Looks pretty, but the price is, by my standards, rather breathtaking - $88 for a 10.5 inch pan. It could be worth it if you keep it for decades, though, and no reason you can't. http://www.stargazercastiron.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZmNyOCzpC8 (To the person wondering what a "spider" is: There is an old style of cast iron pan called a "spider" which has legs on it and can be set directly on the coals of a campfire. For all you Laura Ingalls Wilder fans, there is a description of this in the books. I think there are manufacturers still making them for very hardy campers who don't mind carrying an iron pan with them, or you can buy vintage.)