With crisp fall weather on the way, our stomachs are already looking forward to one of our favorite comfort foods, hot pot. In particular, we’re looking forward to the king of Japanese hot pot dishes, sukiyaki. There’s really nothing quite like the joy of sitting around a table with a group of friends or family members, talking and laughing as you cook the ingredients bit by bit and share in the greatest act of selflessness, letting someone else know when a slice of meat or morsel of vegetable has been cooked to perfection and is ready to be eaten.
Unfortunately, a lot of that doesn’t apply to our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa. While he does deeply love sukiyaki, Seiji lives by himself, and most nights of the week he eats dinner by himself too. So all that communal anticipation and excitement that comes from everyone pitching in to chop the ingredients plus the conversation as you wait for them to stew? Instead of those, Seiji just gets the hassle of doing all the prep work by himself, the tedium of watching the ingredients cook by himself, and then the additional hassle of scrubbing the large cooking pot when he’s done, again, all by himself.
And yet, Seiji still wants to eat sukiyaki, so he got to wondering if there’s an easier way to make it, at which point his thoughts turned to, as ours so often do here at SoraNews24, to rice cookers. We’ve been surprised time and time again at how versatile these kitchen appliances are, and Seiji asked himself th.