I love to keep cooking simple, and preparing a meal does not have to be complicated. These days, a rice cooker and air fryer do most of the work in my kitchen. They make preparing tasty meals easy without getting overwhelmed by lots of different stages of preparation.

Maintaining a daily schedule of complicated meal preparation, spending hours cooking or making elaborate meals, is an area I find stressful.

Rice Cooker

My rice cooker is not only used to cook rice; it is also great for steaming or boiling vegetables, boiling eggs and potatoes, cooking pasta and noodles.

I add ingredients such as tomatoes, eggs or peas to the water when I am cooking rice, and they all cook together in one place. I do the same with pasta by adding vegetables, and if I want to cook potatoes, I cook the potatoes in the rice cooker at the same time as the vegetables. I have a steaming basket on the top where I add either seafood sticks or salmon fillets.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Air Fryer

My air fryer is great for cooking quick meals such as chips, fish fingers or chicken nuggets. It involves very little effort. I set the amount of time I need to cook, and it times it for me. It is faster, easy to use, and produces crispy food. It fries, roasts, reheats and dehydrates.

Image by Katarzyna Javaheri-Szpak from Pixabay

How These Methods Benefit Me

These methods reduce the amount of washing up I have to do after each meal as I am not using lots of different pans. I only have to wash out the air fryer or rice cooker, and cutlery and plates.

I can add all my ingredients and switch them on, which makes the cooking process much simpler.

They also prevent me from burning food, as when the water dries up in the rice cooker, it switches off, and my air fryer times the food for me and also switches off after the time I have set it to cook.  

Reducing stress around deciding each stage and each ingredient to cook, and having fewer steps to remember, saves my energy with predictable meals.

Final Thoughts

I like to prepare simple meals, and there are limitations when using these methods, but they work for me for what I want to prepare. They make life a little easier by reducing decisions, keeping meals predictable, and I use less of my own energy as well as electricity.

These appliances have changed the way I cook. I hate cooking with multiple pans and lots of ingredients being ready at different times.

I like cooking where preparation is minimal, which fits into my daily life. I can spend more time on other things rather than worrying about what food to eat and how to cook it.

Further Ideas:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/air-fryer-recipes

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/rice-recipes