Fall is in the air and college students everywhere are leaving home and heading to school. For the students who will be living in a dorm room, I have a unique suggestion of something to bring with them: a rice cooker.

Cooking is virtually impossible while living in a dormitory, especially when not all dorm rooms are equipped with microwaves and not all dormitory buildings have a group kitchen. Students will end up eating the vast majority of their meals in the university cafeterias or restaurants. This is can be an expensive, unhealthy way to live.

Having a rice cooker in the dorm room is an easy solution to this problem. A lot of people do not realize that a rice cooker is not just for rice. It can be used to cook just about anything and it is much more versatile than other small kitchen appliances.

Here are a few things (besides cooking rice) that a rice cooker can be used for:

• Steaming vegetables: everything from cooking corn to potatoes
• Grilling pancakes
• Cooking eggs: Omelets and hard-boiled eggs
• Cooking fish
• Cooking chicken
• Boiling pasta
• Cooking grains (like quinoa and couscous)
• Making soups and stews
• Steaming tamales
• Steaming dim sum

Rice cookers are much safer than many small kitchen appliances like heating plates and water boilers because rice cookers automatically turn off when the temperature indicates the food is cooked. (This also means it is impossible to burn your dinner!) Plus, the heat is contained inside the rice cooker, so there is less risk of nearby school papers catching on fire.

Here are some suggestions if you decide to get a rice cooker for your dorm room: -

• Choose a rice cooker that has a non-stick finish on the interior of the pot. It will make clean up very easy. -

• Of the three different types of rice cookers, I recommend varieties that use induction heating. These rice cookers cook food more evenly because the special heating elements produce heat around the entire surface of the pot, not just from a heating plate at the bottom. Induction heating rice cookers usually have several features that will allow for fine temperature adjustments for foods other than rice.

In the following weeks, I will post some directions and recipes for easy cooking in dorm rooms. These recipes will be for healthy foods that can be make entirely with a rice cooker.