The Insanity of Cooking

Many things get done in the world because someone had a vision of something better. Herbert O’Driscoll

I am the master of rubber eggs. When I cook scrambled eggs for breakfast, they have a taste and a texture that is cause for both awe and wonder, as well as fear and trembling. The family flees from them like Dracula flees sunlight, and that’s OK. The kids have grown up and moved away and I’ve stopped making them for breakfast.

I honestly don’t know why my scrambled eggs turn out the way they do, but I know it has something to do with the fact that I always prepare them exactly the same way. I am a creature of habit. Insanity, as “they” say, is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

There is a hidden benefit, of course, which is that no one asks me to fix breakfast anymore, so maybe I’m not as crazy as those around me have thought me to be.

Be that as it may, I don’t mind trying different things and I don’t mind trying things differently. A recent craze in the world of the culinary arts, for instance is the multi-functional pressure-cooker-slow-cooker pot you have no doubt seen stacked in the aisles of local mega-marts. Intrigued, I asked for (and Santa delivered) one such device for Christmas.

Sadly, it did not come with any recipes, so I ordered a few Insta-Pot recipe books online so I could use the machine more regularly. Unlike many people of my gender, I happen to enjoy reading instruction manuals and following directions. It makes life much easier (albeit far less adventurous).

Our first dish was actually quite simple; we made a batch of rice. I tossed in the rice, water, and salt in the appropriate proportions, sealed the lid, pressed the RICE button and, voila, the machine heated up and steam poured out the pressure release valve, making it look a bit like an old steam locomotive on steroids. After a few minutes the steam dissipated and after ten minutes the pot’s timer beeped, and the rice was ready.

Interestingly, it was a bit crunchy. I discovered that the pressure cooker’s release valve should have been closed while the rice cooked. Now, I happen to like crunchy rice, but the sunshiny mistress of the house prefers it presented in its more traditional, fluffy form, so we learned from our experience and now we make sure the valve is set properly for whatever we are cooking.

It has really revolutionized our life in the kitchen. We also learned it is better to look for individual recipes online, or to examine recipe books in person. The first book we ordered was worthless as it called for ingredients, many of which we had never heard of, and called for more steps and stages than what the “Insta” part of Insta-Pot would reasonably be understood to mean!

The second volume is actually pretty good, although it doesn’t have a well-organized index, so we have to thumb through it to find what we’re looking for, and the ingredients for each recipe are listed so haphazardly that it is hard to know what has been included or left out at each stage. Be that as it may, though, the few recipes we’ve tried have been as fast and as tasty as anything we’ve fixed in a more traditional manner.

And QUICK! I have been amazed at how much quicker it is to cook under pressure (and even nicer when it is the food that’s under pressure, and not the cook!), and how tender it makes of cheaper cuts of meat.

As I’ve said, I’m a creature of habit, but I do appreciate trying new things. As one fellow said, “If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you’ll never learn how much bigger the world is.”

I think we need to learn to look at this world of ours – God’s world, really – with fresher eyes and less fear. Maybe if I had learned to cook my eggs differently they might have proven to be more palatable for my loved ones. Wouldn’t that have been egg-citing?

In the meantime, life goes on. I’m just going to enjoy it more as pressure builds in this, our valley.