Yep, as a (sorta-not-really) Indian, I gotta say that a rice cooker is a must-have. Indians, Chinese, Japanese, all swear by theirs.

Yes; it's the only way I ever have. It works. Have the liquid 2x volume of quinoa. Use chicken stock for the pilaf effect. Remember to rinse the quinoa in a sieve beforehand to remove the bitterness.

We're having spicy beef stew tonight.

Yummm. :)

Muchas gracias! I'll be giving it a try as soon as I get my rice cooker out of storage. :D

Yabbut, I'm really picky. I hate black olives, any kind of pepper, onions, mushrooms...etc.

People hate ordering pizza with me! :o

We won't be sharing Shawnee - for me it's not pizza without onion.
I also love pineapple, jalapenos, anchovies and pepperoni. It's funny how often people say, "Oh we can just share, I'm not fussy" then back out when they hear my preferences.

My evil ex used to order pizza for us both, and because I wasn't paying I didn't get any choice (personally I compromise if I'm treating someone!) So we always had Meat Feast. Which as I remember it was meat, meat, meat, meat and mushrooms.

heheee...I'm always like "you know, you can live without mushrooms, and I can't eat it with mushrooms...sooooo" and then we proceed to order 2 smalls instead. ;)

On the same token, I don't insist on green olives. There are few pizza places who know how to get just the right amount of GOs anyway, and it works best on the kind of pizzas you can get from the bar where I worked so many years. There are a couple places around.

I wish I liked more stuff. You wouldn't know to look at me how terribly picky I am. ;)

I'd eat that pizza, except for the anchovies, but you basically can't get those anywhere here anyway.

But seriously, do they not do half-toppings on pizzas where you guys live? It's a given here that you can put any of your toppings on all or just half of the pizza.

You probably can now - I haven't shared a pizza in years :(

ANCHOVIES ... PEPPERONI - I'l fight you for 'em SG! Come up here and we'll make our own (bread-machine dough and any topping you like). YummmmMEEEEE!

You can, but with things like peppers, putting them on half does you no good. The pepper oils creep over big time. 'Shrooms you can get away with, but mostly the people assembling the pizza don't really care, and you end up with stray shrooms all over the place. They're pickable, of course, but it's easier to just get a small pizza I like.

You can't get anchovies??? Did I just read that correctly??? What's a pizza without anchovies!?!

I have never heard of any pizza place actually serving anchovies in the States, even the fancier specialty restaurants. But I'm sure there are a couple out there somewhere... when I was a teen working at a fast-food pizza place, we had a British guy call up once and try to order corn on his pizza. He was just blown away that we not only didn't have it, but were doing the telephone equivalent of pointing and laughing at him.

(Of course, now that I am a gourmet adult, I actually make a pizza involving corn on a regular basis. But to be fair it doesn't use the traditional tomato sauce either...)

Must be Texas. I never order anchovies, but I just looked at a couple of local places that have their menus online, and they all have anchovies. The big chains don't have them, but big chain pizza is no good.

Well, okay, it does seem that I spoke in haste. Now that I've done a more thorough search, I did find an Italian restaurant here in town that openly has them on the menu. But it was part of a larger article on anchovies, and the restaurant's quote in the article is about how they just sit on the shelf and no one ever orders them.