Spicy Chicken and Mussels Rice - A Rice Cooker Disaster

You won't believe how many disasters have happened in my kitchen. Disaster. Disaster. Disaster. Too many ot them! This is getting too boring, even for me. Sigh. But I feel the need to share the gospel with you guys. I MUST let you feel what I felt when I took a bite of this disastrous rice dish. MUHAHAHAHAHA!

What the heck happened?

From Raw to Mushy:
My Disastrous Spicy Chicken & Mussels Rice

It all started from one word: LAZY
If you heard any of the following phrases coming out of my mouth/appearing on my blog, they generally mean one thing:
"I don't have enough time" = lazy
"I want to create a one pot wonder" = lazy
"I want to try an easier/more innovative way to do this" = lazy

Cuting a long story short, I wanted a spicy rice dish, which include chicken and seafood of some sort (I chose mussels), and planned to dump them all into my wonderful and trustworthy rice cooker.

I prepared all of the ingredients:
- 2 chicken leg fillet, skin removed, cut into bite sized chunks
- 6 pieces of large mussels, remove from shell
- 200ml chicken stock
- 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 bell peppers, remove core, remove seeds, diced
- 1 small can of tomato paste
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp ground corriander seeds
- salt, pepper, sugar, chilli powder, olive oil, water
- 2 cups of rice

Here's the method that caused the disastrous rice:
Marinate chicken pieces with a bit of salt, pepper and olive oil. Pour rice grains into rice cooker, add chicken stock and water up to the required level, add everything else, mix and press "Cook" and wait until the rice cooker beeps, which means "Your delicious dinner is ready!"

Oh....I wish!

I opened the lid of my rice cooker after the beep, and I saw a beautiful looking dish. It was gloriously red, it smelt fantastic, the chicken meat looked succulent and juicy. Then I saw the grains of rice, and I knew something's wrong. They looked RAW. I took a bite. They WERE RAW!!! Uh oh! SOS! Helppp!!!

Luckily, sous chef has been distracted by Xbox 360, that bought me some more time.

I transferred half portion to a non stick pot and continue to cook it with low heat, stirring from time to time, tears dropping into the dish and probably made it tastier. The other half was left in the rice cooker, and I pressed "Cook" once more. Let's see if any of those two methods worked....

They didn't. Although I closely supervised the one cooking in the pot, the moment the rice's done, it was all mushy. Sob, it was probably because of all the tears. The other half in the rice cooker? Ditto. Sob sob. I actually love my rice rather mushy. However, this time, it is just beyond mushy. It's super mushy. Even I, the mushy rice lover, hated it. Oh gawd!

Did I throw the dish away? Nope. We still finished it. Apart from the super mushy rice, everything else tasted fantastic. Dammit. I will find another way to cook this dish.

I should be more careful in conducting my "experiments" in the name of laziness. I am hoping for less disasters this year (as none would be impossible).

Check out my other disasters here.