Three things with Melissa Leong: ‘I think they revoke your licence to be Asian if you don’t own a rice cooker’

Australian TV star and food writer Melissa Leong: ‘The amount of bad jobs, outfits, relationships or meals I could have avoided if I’d have kept a closer eye on my boundaries would astound you!’ Photograph: Supplied

Melissa Leong made her name hosting cooking shows such as MasterChef Australia but her latest TV gig is something different entirely. For the new SBS documentary miniseries The Hospital: In The Deep End, which explores the inner workings of Australia’s health system, the presenter has scrubbed up and been put to work at Sydney’s St Vincent’s hospital.

Before she became a TV star, Leong worked as a food writer, a cookbook editor and food media consultant. But while many of the fooderati who grace this column name expensive knives as their most essential cooking tool, Leong relies on something different in the kitchen: her rice cooker.

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Here the food personality tells us about the many virtues of that inexpensive but indispensable device, and shares the stories of other belongings she would hate to part with.

What I’d save from my house in a fire

I’ve moved so many times in the past couple of years that I’ve become pretty good at letting things go via the process of reviewing, packing and setting up shop somewhere else. I think it’s made me less sentimental than other people. But there is a box of little things I’ve hung on to from the rollercoaster of the past few years.

Inside it are mementoes from people I’ve worked with. There’s a note from my Dessert Masters co-host and judge Amaury Guichon from just after we finished our first season together. One from a director at the Sydney Opera House after my first gig there, hosting a sold-out event for Jamie Oliver. Sentimental cards from people I care about. Articles from magazines and newspapers that will one day remind me that for a brief moment in time I contributed something to the conversation – even if that conversation was trivial.

I keep them all in a box in my house. I don’t really go through it but it’s nice to know it exists when I’m having an existential crisis.

My most useful object

My rice cooker. Obviously, it’s partially because I’m Chinese, but it’s also because it’s completely awesome. I mean, it does everything, and it’s something I cannot legitimately live without. Don’t quote me, but I think they revoke your licence to be Asian if you don’t own one for longer than a year.

I was travelling in Italy recently and witnessed a huge tour group arrive from China. Between about 30 of them, I counted at least five rice cookers, still in their boxes, being claimed from the baggage carousel. I really felt seen in that moment.

From steaming rice (a basic necessity every person of Asian descent requires regularly) to congee (ditto), soups, stews and steaming dumplings, there isn’t much my rice cooker can’t do.

Want to know why Asians don’t raisin? Rice cooker steam. Look into it, it’s legit. Who needs hyaluronic acid serum when you have a rice cooker?

The item I most regret losing

My boundaries. I have them back now but for a couple of years I really lived a boundary-free existence. Maybe they were behind the sofa in a share house in my 20s, or I gave them to a micromanaging, passive-aggressive former boss.

I couldn’t tell you where exactly I dropped them but boy did I pay for it. The amount of bad jobs, outfits, relationships or meals I could have avoided if I’d have kept a closer eye on my boundaries would astound you!

In all seriousness, women in particular are taught so early in life that people pleasing is where it’s at. It starts off simply enough, but when you stop speaking up for yourself and what you feel is right or comfortable for you, you’ve lost yourself.

Thanks to a slew of detectives, friends and a good therapist, I have managed to relocate the slippery little suckers that are my boundaries and embed them with an AirTag so they never go missing again.

• The Hospital: In the Deep End is available to watch now on SBS on Demand