There is that. But you can always use it for cooking other things. I've used mine for cooking other grains and pastas (mixed results), and just meats and vegetables. It's a lot faster than my slow cooker, and generally cleaner/easier than a pot on the stove (less monitoring the temperature and reduced concern of things like boiling over, helps that mine is probably too large for a single person but I also try to cook up 3-4 days of food at once for work lunches).