My love affair with this fair-skinned grain began a dozen years ago in Europe. My best cooking teacher ever, Kenny Rencher, had not entered the picture yet. But I was taking short lessons from Napoleon. And if there was one thing he knew, it was rice.

I don’t remember for sure his ethnicity, but his skin was dark and handsome. Maybe Hawaiian. He was bigger than I, he threw a mean Frisbee®, and he loved good food. He took the patience to show me the ropes of good rice. Not the mushy overcooked rice my mom had always made– I was learning to make it dry so it stuck together when we were done. Sticky so my new chop-stick fingers could coax it from the bowl to my mouth. We’d start with white, rinsed rice, add the bare minimum of water to get it cooked, then put it over just a medium flame until it just started boil. Then we’d simmer it low so our precious water could do its damage softening the grains. If you got the proportions right and kept it just barely simmering, you had beautiful, tender, sticky rice when you were done. While the rice was cooking, we’d cut up some sausages that looked like high quality hot dogs, fry them in oil, stir in veggies and curry powder, add the rice as it finished, drop an egg in on top, and fry it all together for a few minutes. On a decadent day we also had Campbells sweet and sour sauce from a small glass jar — How such a fully American product was available in former Soviet territory I couldn’t say. But rice in my diet was here to stay.

Bob Dylan did it. Jimi Hendrix was is. You can do it too. Today’s electric rice cookers do essentially the same thing as Napoleon taught me. They take your well-cared-for rice and a minimal amount of water, then apply gentle cooking pressure until the rice is done.

It is seriously so easy to make good sticky rice these days. Since my days with Napoleon, I have switch from denuded (white) rice to the more natural, fiber-filled, brown variety. But for all its nutritional qualities, brown rice is not the fastest kid on the block. Thirty five minutes you’ll be waiting for that rice to be done if you didn’t think ahead. And 35 minutes feels like a century when you were hungry an hour ago.

But who has time to cook ahead? Some days I’m so busy I don’t know when I’ll ever be home and awake for 35 minutes straight to cook the rice and make sure I turn it off when it’s done so it doesn’t scorch the bottom. If you’ve suffered through this chicken-egg syndrome like me, you’ve come to the right place. Who has time co cook rice? You do! When you’re done with this article, cooking rice is sure to take no more than 25 seconds from of your day.

One thing I’ve realized in my quest for great food, fast, is that you should never wait on it. To this end comes the beginning of today’s blog. Rice Makers from Hell. Renamed Sleep Easy Rice so as not to scare anyone off.

Which leads us to this: cook your rice the night before. Or the morning before. Or an hour before. Do it any time you feel the urge, just make sure it’s done before you want to eat it!

Once upon a time in a far off there lived an engineer who invented the electric rice maker. And this inventor’s manager must have thought that a plain, ordinary rice maker was not what the American populous demanded. She wanted to improve it just a little bit; gain that additional 2% of the market share; put her competitors out of business. She ordered her engineer to change that beautifully simple, perfectly natural solution to world hunger into something else. She ordered a rice maker with a warm cycle.

Here’s a shot of my new $13 rice maker from Rival. Note two settings on the front: Cook and Warm. You put your water, rice, and salt inside and push the button to the “cook” position. When the rice is done, the button pops back up and it switches to the “warm” cycle.

In my opinion, when your rice is done cooking, it’s already warm. But faithfully, even today the makers of rice makers continue to put a warming element in their makers to “keep the rice warm for up to three hours” as one advertised. But have you ever eaten rice that sat on the warming cycle for three hours? It’s brown and crusty at the bottom of the pan, not to mention the pan is a pain in the arse to clean. But most importantly, the warm cycle is the whole reason you have to stay awake at night to turn your faithful rice cooker off before you go to bed. That is, until now. I’ll show you how to completely remove and disable the warming element from your rice maker. And 25 seconds later you can turn on your rice maker and go to bed.

If your maker is of another brand, or even if yours didn’t come via the Wal-Mart conglomerate like mine did, it is likely quite similar to my Rival® on the inside. To start the surgery, just flip it over and remove the three screws on the bottom.

Here’s a shot of the internal “guts” of my Rival® maker. These makers have two heating elements. This one has a main element embedded in the base of the maker, putting out 265 watts to cook your rice. It also has an auxiliary “warming” element, putting out 35 watts, visible on the right-hand side of the above photo. When you turn it to “cook”, both elements come on. When it clicks to “warm”, only the warming element remains on. The route we will choose to disable the warming cycle is to simply remove the 35-Watt auxiliary warming element.

Remove the screw holding down the warming element, as shown here

Unscrew the nuts holding the warmer’s electrical wires

and remove the warmer, wires and all. Put the nuts back exactly where they were and tighten them down. Then re-assemble the maker.

Now you have your trusty old (or new) maker and a fancy wall decoration that you’ll likely want to discard once you verify that your new toy works like you want it to.

When I said that 25 seconds later you’d be going to bed, your maker dutifully making your next bowl of yumminess, I was exaggerating a bit. You’ll want to test it out to make sure it works exactly as you expect. The most important thing to verify is that when it’s on “warm”, that it produces absolutely no heat. Plug it your maker and leave it on the warm cycle. Leave it there for ten minutes or so, plugged in and set to warm. Now carefully feel with your hand, and make sure that it’s still entirely room temperature. No heat. Idle. When you’re satisfied that the warmer is completely and totally disabled (except for the warming LED indicator which will still come on), make a batch of rice. Don’t go to sleep just yet– to make sure you did everything right, check in on this batch of rice while it’s cooking. Make sure it cooks like normal. When it’s done, leave it plugged in and verify that it cools all the way down to room temperature like you expect. Once you’re absolutely sure it shuts off completely after the rice is done, now you can pop rice in it any time you want, turn it on, and walk right out the door. When you return in an hour, in ten hours, or in two days, you will have happy, fluffy rice ready to be added to your latest cooking wonder.