HAPPY FUN INSTANT POT

At work we have a #talk-food chat channel, and several people evangelize the Instant Pot™, a many-functioned electric device which does:

• Sauté
• Slow Cook
• Pressure Cook
• Rice Cook
• Steam
• Yogurt(!)

(They say "7-in-1," but they may somehow be counting the various pressure and temperature levels. The models bigger than 3 quarts have a few more complex automated programs.)

Being as the small one is $80, I hadn't planned to get one; but the cute little one-button rice cooker I bought off a friend has a peeling nonstick coating, and burns a bottom layer of the morning quinoa. Anna wanted a rice cooker with a stainless steel insert, and at that point you're looking at programmable rice cookers in the $80 range anyway.

Apparently pressure cookers have been an Indian family favorite for decades, though I'm not sure how I only just learned that. Much Instant Pot™ evangelism starts with someone making a Butter Chicken just like their mother or grandmother. I tried a pressure cooker on the sailboat, where cruisers like it for its reduced fuel usage, but it was mysterious and awkward. You had to watch it, wait for it to reach pressure and tell you so via the rattling of Widget #1, turn the heat off after some number of minutes, then when Widget #2 un-clicks or something, then leave it alone for another number of minutes, then vent it. I knew at least a little about cooking by then, but--setting aside the constant monitoring--how did you know how long to apply which phase? How could you adapt random recipes?

The Instant Pot™ uses a tiny computer to handle most of this nonsense for you, and furthermore it appears that once said nonsense is taken out of your hands, pressure cooking is pretty forgiving. Anna has made a fantastic beef stew a couple times (taking maybe 1-2 hours instead of 6 or 7) and gave it her highest accolade: "I can get rid of my Crock-Pot now."

modern technology

The place we lived before the house had a built-in microwave, so we gave mine away. It wasn't a nice microwave, it had the simplest possible controls (a single dial) for my aging grandmother's sake. It warmed things by adding energy to the water molecules inside them, and that plus a door that closes is all you really need out of a microwave.

We've been living all this time without one, for one reason and another, but we've finally gotten to the point of needing to have easy foods around for zombified adults to eat, especially with me and lunch, and while you can of course heat things up in the countertop oven, it requires 30 minutes of planning ahead, which is mostly what we're trying to avoid for the zombified adults.

I had gone without a microwave for a while before, in the Dark Apartment of 2007-2008. I was cooking for myself constantly, engaged in one of the heights of my aikido and Zen practices, and planning 30 minutes ahead for dinner wasn't a problem. Eventually Nana moved into a nursing home back east, and I kept the microwave and toaster oven.

Now it's been 3 years without one, and I would just like to say that holy shit they are amazing.

I eat Trader Joe's Pork Buns sometimes. You can do them on the stove, boiling water (but not too much water) for some amount of time, always check to see if they're done, and the whole thing takes 20 minutes. For frozen pork buns. It's pretty rare that I can start a task 20 minutes ahead of time. Now it's 2 minutes. Frozen Indian food, in like 7 minutes instead of 40.

Once you know how they work and what it's reasonable to use them for, they really are that awesome. I'd forgotten.

fruit explosion!

As I catalogued earlier, we have a ton of fruit trees. Figgy has been going gangbusters, so I made a nice quickbread with whole figs in it, which got split between Anna's grandmother and Arlene, the nice old lady who lives behind us. Delivering the bread to her was, of course, a half hour of sitting down and chatting, but she's fun to talk to.

Then we had too many figs, so I made whole wheat muffins, replacing the water/milk with fig puree, and additional sweetening with maple syrup (one of the delights of our white figs is that they're not super sweet). They came out fabulous, getting stickier and more filling every day. I may seek a lighter recipe.

Figgy now seems to be on hiatus, and our peach tree in front finally self-destructed, its primary branch breaking off under the weight of dozens and dozens of rock-hard peaches. Four inches at the base, I had to cut it into four pieces before I could even move it out of the car-space in the driveway.

(By the way, if you ever do any tree-trimming, I cannot recommend highly enough the Fiskars Power Tooth® Softgrip® Saw (13"). I have never in my life seen a saw this efficient. (I once cut down a 5-inch thick tree with a small hunting knife. I know about efficiency. It's super comfortable to use and you'll just throw your straight-bladed tree-trimmer away.)

We collected all the peaches, and now I guess we'll try to ripen them? In paper bags, apparently. Or use them to break car windows. But really, we ripen them, and then what? We've got a hundred peaches. We'll figure it out.

The peach tree hasn't really been happy anyway, so we'd planned to replace it when tree-planting time comes around. Perhaps with a lemon tree that actually produces lemons instead of 2-inch thorns? Possibilities abound!

Finally, our scrappy little apple tree is getting into the act! The apples we know come from so much grafting and cultivating that we can't actually tell if the apples are ripe. We have yet to try the obvious thing of picking one and trying to eat it. While I can't speak for Anna, I know I've been resistant because there just aren't that many apples, and what if I pick one and it isn't ripe? I'll have wasted an apple! Such are the quandaries of urban farming.

Mmm, perhaps I will go have a fig muffin, and not have to eat for another 12 hours.

cold feet

I must take a moment to fret. Here's a true story.

"Hey, I see the container for French basil. Do we have a container for California basil?"
"I...might have thought it was redundant?"
"What? They're completely different. Here, smell."
"Um...okay."
"See? Completely different."
"Uh-huh."
"California basil is drier. The French has this citrus accent."
"Uh-huh."

I mean...what?

Is marriage really advisable under these circumstances? To someone who can't tell the difference between French and California basil? I am distressed.

Excuse me, I think I have the vapors.

linkfarming

I've been sick and my sleep has been broken, so coherent insights have been few. But the Internet never rests!

• An active-duty Army Ranger is one of the world's 3 top pastry chefs.
• There's a fight over the next version of the Big Book of Mental Illness. (Psychiatry is rightfully afraid of embarrassing itself.)
• You're not allergic to MSG.
• Alexandre Dumas's misadventures with duelling.

Sleep well.