Nuggetty Goodness

I looooooooooooooove animal fat! Fried, baked, stewed, boiled, broiled, cold from the fridge (mmm butter), melted in my tea (mmm cream) - glorious animal faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!

I also love food where the majority of the 'cooking' involves me ignoring it while I go kill mobs. XD

These braised pig trotters are therefore, in a word, perfect!

Crafting materials
2-3 pig trotters (chopped into whatever size your butcher chops them for you)
Soy sauce (5 parts)
Chinese cooking wine (3 parts)
Vinegar (2 parts - doesn't really matter what kind of vinegar. I used apple cider vinegar.)
5 spice powder (1 part)
Ginger, chopped finely (1 part - I used the tube stuff because I'm lazy)
Garlic, chopped finely (1 part - I used paste because... yes I'm lazy)
1 large onion, chopped into bits however small you get to before you get lazy
Brown sugar (a bit)
Ground white pepper (a bit)
Sesame oil (a bit)
Garlic cloves x 5, still in their little skins (Optional)
Enoki mushrooms (Optional, I just love the darn things)

Crafting method

1. Blanch the trotters, leave them to cool, then scrape off and discard whatever bits look dubious to you (usually hairy bits)
2. Mix all the ingredients together except the trotters, chopped onions, garlic cloves and enoki mushrooms
3. Galoosh the liquidy ingredients into your trusty rice cooker
4. Dump in the garlic cloves, onions, and trotters
5. Add enough water so that the trotters are just covered
6. Stir everything until the liquidy ingredients are homogenously... liquidy
7. Separate the enokis into slimmer bunches and strew them on top of the whole liquidy trottery mass
8. Close rice cooker and set it either on Soup/Cook for 2.5 hours, OR set it on Steam for 2.5 hours (this will depend on the kind of rice cooker you have)
9. After 2.5 hours, open the rice cooker and add more water so that the trotters are covered again.
10. Give everything a stir
11. Cook on Soup/Cook OR Steam for another 2.5 hours
12. Splat all that unctuous gooey gelatinous fatty piggy goodness on a plate of white rice and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM. If you can find a decent sambal oelek, even better!

Note
You need to blanch the trotters first (boil them for a short while until they turn white and scummy stuff comes to the top of the boiling water pot) so that they don't smell piggy in a bad way, vs piggy in a good way! Which is what they'll smell like after you get rid of the Bad Piggy by blanching...

Right, the initial fruits of the 'bake' function on my nice new cooking consort.

Manual said 50 minutes, but the cooker beeped at 30. Suicide Granny informs me that I should at least double the cooking time (the poor thing is so flat!). *Sniffle* when I steamed it in my old cooker it poofed out nicely!

Next time, I shall ignore the slackerly squeals of this new rice cooking consort and double the time, at least! *shakefist*

It's still quite edible though. It isn't hardening into ice-pick stage anyway. Kinda chewy. Nom.

...after years of staring enviously at Japanese models, reading blog posts rhapsodising about their advanced features, then being confronted with the Single Button, it's finally happened!

I've found the rice cooker of my dreams. (Alas, the Interwebs have no pictures, but nonetheless, this is my promised one!)

It has the faithful single button.

But it also has a bake function. Yes. BAKE!

Verily, the nugget shall sally forth on the morrow to woo it, win its hand (or is that its pot), and thereafter to whisk it lovingly over the threshold of the nuggetty abode.

And there shall be eternal bliss.

Or well - at least 5 years of bliss. I swear, rice cookers are some of the hardiest appliances around.