We have a Proctor-Silex C36507 Vegetable Steamer / Rice Cooker which we’ve had for ages. Somewhere in our various moves, the manual got separated from the gizmo (personally, I suspect Sue’s piano ate it). For the stuff we usually make, that’s no big deal – dump in water, dump in vegetables, set timer. Tonight we decided to make rice instead of going out in the 100-degree heat to the local Chinese restaurant like we usually do. Of course, the 25-word summary on the back of the unit doesn’t go into details about cooking rice, and the rice bag was similarly un-helpful.

Dinner was delayed a bit while we both scoured the Internet looking for a copy of the manual – after all, the Internet has everything – so why wouldn’t it be available there? Well, you’d probably be surprised – we were. There were a lot of requests from people looking for the same manual, without any luck. I did find a manual on manualslib.com However, it was a not-so-great scan of a nearly 25-year-old FAX of a printer’s draft of the manual, complete with crop marks and various spots of indeterminate origin. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that aside from the front and back covers, the actual manual pages had been shrunk to only occupy around 1/4 of each 8.5″ x 11″ page. Since there’s no room in our small kitchen for a microscope to read that, I did a bit of work in Photoshop to resize, crop, and clean it up. The resulting printout is currently occupying a place of honor in the kitchen (on the side of the fridge).

On the off chance that you’re one of the dozens of people looking for this manual, I’ve put a copy on my web site here (PDF) to save you the trouble. Note that this is the same manual you can get from ManualsLib, just cleaned up. All credit for tracking down this elusive beast goes to them.