Cooking pasta in a rice cooker is easy.  No draining required.

First make sure your rice cooker can handle the amount of COOKED pasta–remembering that it doubles in volume when cooked. Mostly I make about 1 cup dry, 2 cups cooked in my rice cooker.

For “shaped” pasta like elbows, bow ties, penne, etc. put the amount dry i.e. 1 cup in the cooker. Add water to cover plus maybe 1/8-1/4-inch above the pasta (depending on how soft you like it) If you like it REALLY al dente, then just cover with water.

Add some salt to the water (you can leave that out if you’re watching your salt) but go easy because remember a rice cooker cooks by evaporation. Then add about 1 tsp oil to stop the foaming, close the lid and set to “cook.” I open the lid and stir a few times while cooking to keep it separated. I also try to catch it before it switches to “warm” so it doesn’t brown on the bottom. It’s a bit of a learning curve with times and water amounts, but once you have that all down, you’ll find it’s easy, quick, no waiting for big pots of water to boil, no draining (the worst part for me) and it doesn’t heat up your kitchen which is great in the summer!!!

For spaghetti, I break the spaghetti in 1/2 and cook like I do shaped pasta. About the only thing I can’t do in this is lasagna noodles…since you can’t break them if you make a big dish of the stuff–although I’m trying to figure that one out.