<i>The downside is that cooking in a rice cooker is a low fidelity way of cooking.</i><p>If you invest in a PID controller (Auber Instruments sells a particularly well-known line of them), you can make your rice cooker the highest-fidelity cooking appliance in your kitchen. The PID controller reads the temperature in the cooker with a thermocouple probe and strobes the power to the cooker to maintain a precise temperature, resulting in a temperature-controlled water bath.<p>Temperature-controlled water bath cooking ("low temp" cooking, or, inaccurately, "sous vide" cooking) is the future of the modern kitchen. Most proteins, most starches, and many vegetables benefit from it, it's almost as easy to execute as Ebert's rice cooker meals, and has the huge advantage of taking precise timing out of the equation; most low-temp preparations can be started in the morning and plated when you get back from work, like slow-cooker meals.<p>If you're remotely interested in cooking, low-temp cooking is about the nerdiest way you can go about it, and the results really are pretty spectacular: you can get perfect custard-texture egg yolks (not to mention reliably perfect custards of all sorts), an absolutely perfect end-to-end medium rare steak, reliably perfect pork chops, a week's worth of perfect chicken breasts for cold prep (sandwiches and salads) or last-minute pasta dishes, perfect glazed root vegetables --- I keep using the word "perfect" because when you have a small computer making sure your food never goes over or under its ideal target finish temperature by more than a degree or so, that's what you end up with.<p>I have a Polyscience circulator now, but I used to use a Black & Decker rice cooker and an Auber PID controller, and while there are benefits to the professional circulator (I'm pretty sure I can circulate a bathtub and cook a whole pig in it if I really wanted to), pretty much any DIY plan you find on the Internet will do just fine; you can even try what Serious Eats recommends and do your first couple of experiments with a beer cooler.<p>Also, regarding this particular meal: try chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts. Chicken breasts are particularly expensive (everyone wants them), but chicken thighs are more delicious, more forgiving of time/temperature variation, and in long-cooking applications like this, all the downsides (fattiness and toughness) are mitigated by the cook time.<p>If you're just now thinking about starting to cook instead of going out every night, and you don't want to go too nuts with it, I'd recommend a crock pot / slow cooker. They're not sexy, but wow are they ever useful. You can buy a Costco block of chicken thighs and chuck them in your freezer, and then each morning just open one package of them into your slow cooker with an onion and some garlic, salt, and pepper. Run on "slow" all day. Done. Same thing with any cheap chuck cut of beef, or with pork shoulder. Everyone I talk to that "discovers" the slow cooker falls in love with it.