I’ve had the same rice cooker since I was in college (and that wasn’t recent). Judge for yourself, but it cooks rice just as perfectly now as it did when I was living off rice, ramen, and eggs. It’s a budget brand—no Zojirushi, that’s for sure—but that’s okay. Whether your machine costs $200 with 30 settings or $15 with one switch, rice cookers all have the same basic premise. The best part is that they’re so easy to use, even the least confident cook can feel good about their rice. Here’s how to use a rice cooker for rice—and the many other non-rice dishes you can cook in it.

(Please forgive me if my stove looks different in the photos; let's just call it "seasoned," okay?)

A rice cooker uses heat and water to cook rice. If you’ve ever cooked rice in a pot on the stove, you know that heat and water aren’t hard to come by. It’s the final stage of not letting the rice burn that’s tricky. That’s where the rice cooker wins. Unlike your pot on the stove, a rice cooker has a sensor that makes sure your grains are fluffy and perfectly cooked, then stops cooking.

Rice cookers have a simple mechanism inside: a thin metal bowl to hold the rice, a heating plate inside with a spring mechanism underneath, and a thermostat. When you fill the metal bowl with water and rice and load it into the machine, the heating plate easily conducts through the thin metal of the bowl. The temperature only rises to boiling point (212°F) during cooking, because that is the peak temperature of water before it evaporates.