I have been a little -- how shall I say it? -- lax about cooking for the past month or so, so I discovered just yesterday that my poor rice cooker got all smashed in during my latest move.
It was a model I had owned for quite some time -- the only rice cooker I've owned, actually, and my mom ordered it from Taiwan for my first summer away from home, I believe, after my junior year of college.
It's the only brand I ever saw in my parents' house, and pretty much everybody in Taiwan has a rice cooker made by Tatung, which is one of those Asian conglomerates that manufactures a wide, seemingly haphazard line of products. Their massive headquarters is not far from one of my cousins' houses, so I saw the building quite a bit when I was in Taipei earlier this year.
Anyway, when I went online to look for a replacement rice cooker, I found several models, but the one I wanted seemed to be available only -- oddly enough -- through a site that sells primarily computer equipment. And they were out of stock. So, since I still had some credit at Amazon, I went there and, after some very thoughtful research (read: looked at a couple of pictures and read one oh-so-helpful user review), I settled on a Panasonic, a decision my mother would certainly Not Approve Of if she was here. And if buying a Japanese rice cooker was not bad enough, she would Doubly Not Approve Of my selection of an electronic model.
But if I'm going to break from tradition, I might as well go all the way, right?
I just hope my experience with this thing is better than the one I had with those high-tech toilets.
1 comment:
This reminds me of the time my Tatung died, so I bought a Japanese-brand electronic rice cooker from Kmart. It took about three meals for me to hate it. I looked all over Portland but could not find a Tatung to save my life. Well, we went up to Vancouver, B.C., to do some Christmas shopping that year and my dear spouse decided he would get me a Tatung there as my present. We literally walked all over Chinatown before we finally found one. I was so happy that the owner was laughing. He told us that Tatungs are really hard to find on the West Coast because they come in through only one port, Long Beach, and the SoCal retailers usually grab all of 'em for their customers. He added that every time he gets a few, they sell out immediately.
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