We bought the rice cooker a while ago when I was going through a bento phase and having real trouble getting my Japanese rice right. I can safely say that besides the kettle and toaster this is the most used piece of kit in the kitchen. Within a week it had replaced the microwave on our kitchen worktop and we must use it two or three times a week. It's a really versitile bit of kit - as the description states it has 4 functions which are:

Rice cooking
The obvious one. The rice cooker comes with a booklet that gives you advice on how to cook different types of rice. Because different rices have different absorbancy capacities (e.g basmati is very different to long grain which is different again to Jasmine rice) you need slightly different amounts of water for each type of rice. For my Japanese sticky rice, I find that 1:1.3 rice to water ratio works about right. You can cook up to 10 cups of rice at a time which is a hellishly large amount, so great if you're entertaining.

The rice cooker has a delayed start function which is absolutely brilliant for bento boxes. You can set your rice cooker up the night before and have warm, perfectly cooked rice in the morning. It's also great if you're going out somewhere and want the rice to be ready when you get back. It also has a keep warm function which means that if your rice is finished before whatever you're serving it with it keeps the rice nice and warm until you're ready to use it. I've found it's best to let the rice stay on keep warm for a little while after it's finished cooking as any residual stickiness/wateriness will be thoroughly worked out by that point.

I've also found it works really well if you throw some veg in to cook with your rice. If you do that, though, you might need to add a little extra water to cater for the veg. Otherwise your rice can finish cooking before it's quite finished.

Slow cooker
We've used this a couple of times and had fantastic results. It works like any slow cooker - you throw everything in, switch it on and leave it to cook for up to 9 hours. Another great function for if you want to go out for the day and fancy a nice warm stew or soup for when you get back in. Again, the keep warm function kicks in once it's finished cooking.

Steamer
The unit comes with an inner steaming bowl for steaming veg or fish or whatever. As the steamer bowl sits over the main bowl, you can steam at the same time as you're cooking the rice, which means that you really can do an entire meal in the rice cooker.

Porridge
I haven't used this function so can't really comment on how it works.

Other great aspects to this rice cooker:
- it comes with an instruction book and recipe book with lots of great ideas about how to get the best use out of it.
- it's very, very easy to clean. The rice lifts easily from the non-stick bowl and you don't get any of that messy residue that it left on a pan after cooking rice. I'd say it's easier to clean than a pan.
- it's really quick. A couple of cups of rice takes around 10 minutes.
- your rice is perfectly cooked and there's no need to rinse it after cooking.
- no need to use salt (unless you want to). If you do use salt, use less than you normally would as it would be very salty otherwise.
- it doesn't use excess water. Just put in the right amount of water for your rice (following the instructions) and any slight excess will be steamed off. We usually end up with about a tablespoon of water left if the water drainer at the end.

Only downside to this rice cooker I would say is that it's quite bulky, but as it takes up less space than our microwave did we haven't really had any complaints.

I know the idea of rice cookers in this country is a bit alien. I've mentioned it to a number of my friends and they all give me a bit of an odd look, after all how difficult is it to cook rice? I understand that viewpoint, but then again you could say that it's perfectly possible to toast a piece of bread under the grill but most of us have toasters. It's hard to explain how much better the rice is from the rice cooker. It's light and fluffy, there's no excess moisture used either in the cooking or left in the rice afterwards. You can set the machine and basically forget about it, and it'll just give you a little beep once it's finished to let you know. It's really great for more speciality grain rices which are more difficult to cook right like Japanese, Jasmine or Basmati rice and as well as rice it slow cooks and steams.

We bought our rice cooker from Tesco for around £40. You can also download the user manual (but not the recipe book) direct from the Tefal website in case you ever lose it.