I don’t hate salads, but I never seem to eat them. I rarely want to order them in a restaurant, and I not only dislike the kinds of home made salads always presented at potlucks, but I find my own salad materials rotting in the crisper every time I think I’ll get around to making one. I guess I’m just not a salad person, or so I thought.

I ate a scary large salad for lunch and enjoyed it, and a few days ago I ate another. I bought salad materials at the store today on purpose. Have I gone mad? No, I’ve simply found my salad stride. What changed? What led me from the dark side eschewing salad to feasting on the stuff? I realised a few things about my own tastes and began to experiment until I found out what exactly about salads I deplored and quickly excised them from my salad bowl.

First of all, I wasn’t doing math right in my head. As someone who doesn’t calorie count, like most people, I judge my food by quantity on my plate. This is all fine and dandy, but there’s a big difference between half a cup of rice or your sandwich bread and half a cup of spinach in terms of raw calories. If you’re going to eat a salad for a meal, you have to make it bigger than you expect. Double my salad quantity and I’m significantly more satisfied.

It seems logical then that a rib-sticking salad should include some form of protein to keep you from getting the grumblies a few hours later, but I realised that I do not enjoy protein in my salad. I don’t like beans, I don’t enjoy tofu, I hate fish, and I generally don’t even like cheese amid my leafy greens. Of course I like all of these things separately just fine, but put them in a salad and I start to turn up my nose. So guess what, I stopped trying to make sure I had protein in my salads and they started to look many times tastier. I’m happy to eat the protein, say a bit of peanut butter on an apple or a side of lentils or even leftover salmon but I immediately get disgusted if it’s put atop my salads.

Perhaps protein’s presence in my salad is overwhelming. On my path to salad bliss I’ve discovered that my least favourite salad of all time is the “hodgepodge” of anything and everything. I like vegetables. Not just most vegetables, I like all of them: the ugly green ones, the bitter ones that require extra cooking, the ones that stain your fingers and kitchen knives, the stringy ones, the ones masquerading as other foods, the ones toddlers are afraid of, all of them. Yes, even capsicum. I’ll eat the heart out of that, provided there’s nothing else in my icebox. However, I do not enjoy all of vegetables hanging out at town square together. I’ve never liked the cornucopia of roasted vegetables I grew up with. I never enjoyed the jubilee of veggies in a casserole. Only four ingredients allowed in my salad: one green, one onion-ish item, and only two others. Those other two can be whatever: pears and walnuts, grapefruit and avocado, mushrooms and hard boiled egg, so long as your ingredients don’t total over 4. Apparently I like thematic, segregated, minimal vegetables in my salad.

That was it. That’s all it took to get me to eat salads regularly. It wasn’t the ingredients I didn’t like, nor was it the concept of a salad, and I’ll eat just about any dressings around. It was my idea of what a salad was. Now though, I did eat a salad for lunch and let me tell you, it was delicious.

I cleaned up this Christmas, taking home a ridiculously fancy rice maker, you know the kind that has all the bells and whistles: two timers, a computer chip that touts “fuzzy logic”, and, no joke, the ability to bake a cake. It even sings to you when your rice is ready, and I wish I was kidding. Short of mowing the lawn this thing can do everything and anything, including turn the girl that was addicted to pasta into the girl that eats rice with every meal.

I was always fairly hesitant to own a rice maker since I didn’t eat an overwhelming amount of rice, and even when I do it’s usually the boxed flavoured variety. Yet, I eat a lot of vegetables and often scramble to find something else to fill up my plate, something neutral, like a bread or a pasta or a potatoe. Then it dawned on me that perhaps I wasn’t eating much rice because making rice was such a hassle. My pans never heated evenly, so my rice never cooked perfectly, plus it took a hefty 55 minutes to get white rice sufficiently done, an hour and half for brown rice. Maybe, just maybe, if I didn’t have to maintain constant vigilance over a bubbling batch of rice, then perhaps I might eat more of it.

Dead on. I absolutely love rice in a way I never thought was possible, all because of a fancy machine. I have the timer set so my rice is ready when I walk through the door (and still kept toasty if I’m even hours late), and it takes me about ten minutes to saute up some veggies or heat up some leftovers (Korean-style soup is my current favourite). Some nights I’ll throw in some lentils, vegetable stock, and onions, set the menu to “mixed rice” and go to the gym. When I’m stretched and showered, I’ve a hot meal at the ready, no prep involved. It really is a modern wonder.

Let’s talk about congee (okayu or juk) for a second. The porridge setting. Experimenting with this setting has led me to a world of breakfast foods I didn’t even know I was missing. A bowl of rice porridge is like a blank canvas just waiting for whatever you want to add — miso and green onion for a savoury start to your day, dried cranberries and apricots with cashews and a drizzle of honey for a sweeter tooth, a few bits of cheese and fresh tomatoe make for good lunch, while coconut milk and pistachios or mango is a belly-warming dessert. Not into the rice part? You can also make steel-cut oatmeal with maple, oats in cream of asparagus soup with cracked black pepper, or even non-instant grits for my comrades in the south. It’s been an easy, cost-effective, super filling and very versatile option for me this winter. I’d highly recommend giving this setting a try.

I liken the rice maker to a fancy coffee maker. You can always drip coffee the old-fashioned way, and sure a $20 contraption will do the trick for your morning brew, but if you’re making coffee every day, why not invest in a nicer model, one that say, grinds the beans for you, or has a timer so your coffee is ready ten minutes after your alarm goes off? Why not have something that can brew espresso too if you’re in the mood for a double dose of caffeine? It’s the same with rice. Sure you can make it on a stovetop just fine, but you can also just press a button instead and have it be not only ready, but perfectly cooked every time. Curry taking a bit longer than expected to reduce? Your rice maker probably has a “keep warm” function that makes sure the rice is still nice and hot without overcooking it into a hard mass of starch. It’s brilliant, really. If you’ve been in debate over whether the micom/micro computer makers were worth the money, take it from me, they’re worth every penny.

On my plate: okayu (rice porridge) with miso and green onion

Nong-Shim is a Korean food manufacturer known for their spicy instant noodles as well as a few varieties of shrimp crackers. When my local convenience store started carrying the brand along with the classic Japanese brands and the ever ubiquitous nissin cup-o-noodles, I thought I’d give their products a go to see if there was any validity to the “hot and spicy” promised on the packaging.

I picked up a few of the different offerings and started with the beef-flavoured cup (containing no actual beef, surprisingly) and I have to say, it’s much better than the atrocity I picked up last week: Maruchan’s Yakisoba. To begin with, the tiny cup holds a surprising amount of noodles, complete with lots of dried veggies, mostly green onions and mushrooms that rehydrated fully compared to the usual corn/carrot fare. You can see the sizable chunks in the pre-cooking shot below.

Generous flavour packet as well full of what was honestly a decently hot and spicy soup base. Sure it’s not tongue searing, but it certainly isn’t for the faint of heart and I personally find it pretty refreshing to have a bit of the good stuff in the instant noodle aisle. It was bright red, so from the get go I thought it promising.

Packaging is sturdier than your average instant noodle cup, more plastic than styrofoam, and the paper is coat to keep the water and steam in. I noticed the difference when the noodles were completely plump and ready before my 3 minute timer was up. I quite enjoyed the taste, and especially liked that you could add less of the flavour if you were sensitive to spice or worried about the nutritional intake. It’s pretty easy to spot in the bright red and black graphics, though not often easy to find. Much more popular are the company’s shrimp and “vegetal” flavoured Kimchi bowls.

Price wise, all the Nong-Shim products seem to rank about the same as the upscale and fancier instant noodle bowls, on par with something like Kraft easy mac or Chef Boyardee, though to my taste buds, far tastier (about 1.50 at my local 7eleven). Health-wise the Shin Cup also on par with other instant noodles, complete with 65% of your daily sodium intake, though the Shin Cup also has 2g protein and 12g of fiber, and 0 trans fat if you’re counting. Surprising for a convenience food, actually.

Overall I rate the shin cup pretty highly. I look forward to giving their packets of Yeul Ramyon and the larger Kimchi-flavoured noodle bowl a try soon. I’ll be sure to share my findings. But first, I have some noodles to finish!

On my plate: homemade pizza with yellow pepper, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, roasted garlic, and goat’s cheese

On my plate: delicious vegetable pot pie from wee feast

On my plate: “clash of the snacks” — chips with salsa, chile con queso, and quacamole, homemade bean and cheese nachos, onion rings and taquitos, blonde oreos, pretzels, and bagel bites, all washed down with a margarita and a Cowboys victory (not to mention Perseus and Laurence Olivier saving the world from a gaggle of angry Greek gods)

On my plate: ambiance and miso-glazed sea bass with house-made sweet chili sauce, nishiki rice, and baby bok choy from TenPenh. The complete meal consisted of vegetarian spring rolls with three dipping sauces (including black vinegar and spicy sesame), the sea bass, five-spice chocolate cake a la mode, and a surprisingly delicious mocktail with cranberry and pineapple juice, sprite, and passionfruit puree. All in all a worthwhile venture. Long live Restaurant Week.

On my plate: rigatoni with chunky neopolitana sauce, roasted garlic bread, and a salad of arugala, goats cheese, and warm roasted golden beetroot all dressed in lemon juice and olive oil

On my plate: marinated seaweed salad with sesame and yuzu, part of a sushi dinner completed by edamame, assorted nigiri, and ice cold Kirin Ichiban