How I Came to Love my Instant Pot
Learning to Feed Myself
Parents, teach your kids to cook!
Until I moved out of my parents’ house, I had never cooked anything more complicated than a quesadilla. My parents were Boomers, that narcissistic generation that never really accomplished much, but managed to screw the world up for the rest of us, and then gaslit everyone but themselves for the fallout of their excesses. When I was a kid, whenever I’d try to do anything in the kitchen, I would get screamed, and I do mean SCREAMED at. Yeah, Mom was a screamer. Ace door slammer too, in case anyone is recruiting for the Olympic Door Slamming Team. The punishment for attempting to learn a useful life skill such as cooking was a good tongue lashing. See, where a normal person would think their job as a parent was to prepare their kids for the world, my narcissistic parents were more focused on protecting their turf and not letting anyone threaten to replace them by daring to develop skills that might render them unnecessary.
Anyway, the upshot was that by the time I went off to college, my idea of preparing a meal meant either a run to McDonald’s or cracking open a can of Chef Boyardee. Gordon Ramsay I was not. While I was in college, I met a few people who knew a little about cooking. I didn’t learn a lot from any one of them, but I did learn a trick or two here and there, enough to convince me that perhaps the whole meal preparation thing was less arcane than I had been raised to believe. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that regular people might actually prepare meals on a daily basis. Meals that did not require a can opener or talking to a mechanical clown.
By the time I was done with college, I had a small but yummy repertoire of dishes I could make consistently well. I used to make this one dish that was basically just rice & beans, with some jalapeños cooked in to keep it interesting. I also learned how to do egg burritos. The secret to those is to cook the eggs with diced tomatoes until they are almost dry, then double-wrap them in tortillas. Bliss. Another favorite was carne asada. I used to marinate the meat in beer. Great results. One tip: Marinate the meat in the fridge. I made a batch where I screwed up and left the meat out too long at room temperature. The result was some tasty carne asada, followed by a whole weekend of vomiting. Do yourself a favor and keep it cold until it’s time to cook.
I was attending school in Southern California, thus the Mexican theme. Still, I found myself eating better than I ever had before. In fact, I was turning into a good enough cook that friends were starting to notice. I realized that, for all her territoriality regarding her cooking, Mom was really a pretty bad cook. Horrid even. I used to joke that when someone offered me food “like Mom used to make,” I interpreted it as a threat. I credit her cooking for the robust immune system that has kept me reasonably healthy most of my life.
By the time I got married, I had a somewhat decent set of cooking skills. One of the few useful skills I learned from my Dad was how to carve meat. He once worked as a butcher, and taught me some cool stuff, like how to carve a turkey. You’d be amazed how many people are completely incompetent at turkey carving. If you ever see someone carving a turkey, ask for the oyster. You’ll be glad you did. I also know how to break down a chicken (much like a turkey, just smaller; remember to get the wishbone) and how to carve and debone ham. Save the stripped turkey carcass and the ham bone; both can be used to make soup stock. Stay away from electric knives. They shred meat. My family had one of those, and I only saw it used once. Dad was a sucker for gimmicks, and the electric knife had huge appeal for the gadget junkie. That electric knife was noisy (think small-scale chainsaw) and destroyed the turkey he was trying to carve. Never again.
Over the years, I have done almost all the meal preparation in our house. My cooking has gotten better. I got better at portioning, and am good at adjusting recipes for food sensitivities. My wife has a severe food allergy, and I have had friends here and there with various religious dietary requirements. I was vegetarian for about 10 years. I don’t see issues like that as inconveniences, but as challenges. When I agree to bring food to a work potluck, the first thing I ask is whether anyone has particular dietary requirements that need to be addressed. In a former job, I had an interesting problem come up one evening. One of my co-workers, a devout Muslim, had run across the street for a hamburger. He got back to the workplace, unwrapped his food and could not eat it. The burger place mistakenly gave him a bacon hamburger. He offered it to me, but I couldn’t eat it either, as I was vegetarian at the time. The only other people working that day were another Muslim and an Orthodox Jew. All those people, and that burger went in the trash because not one of us could eat it, all because of a couple pieces of bacon that were not supposed to be there.
In 2020, we moved into a new apartment. This apartment is nice enough, but I failed to notice when I looked at it before moving in, that it has no fume hood over the stove. No fume hood in the kitchen at all. Also, there is a smoke detector near the stove. Sadly for me, the smoke detector is wired into the building’s power grid, so no pulling the batteries while I cook. I have super sensitive hearing, and nothing irritates me more than smoke alarms going off for no reason. They are too sensitive and much too loud. That smoke alarm, combined with the lack of kitchen ventilation, basically means I cannot use the stove. I thought about getting a toaster oven and maybe a panini press, but after a while, too many counter-top appliances can take over your kitchen and leave you with no prep space. That left me with a problem: how to prepare meals with no stove. Eating out of cans and talking to mechanical clowns was not an option.
My wife stayed in touch with a former co-worker who used to rave about her Instant Pot. I knew superficially what the Instant Pot was, but did not really know much about it. I had seen them online, and figured they were just pressure cookers with extra steps. Not really my cup of latte. Pressure cookers always terrified me. Not in the sense that monsters under the bed or math tests terrified me, but more in the sense that I have always seen them as a bomb waiting to go off. I majored in chemistry in college, and have studied all those pretty equations that describe how pressure increases in sealed containers when heat is applied. I always used to go to the other end of the house when my Mom would use her old-school pressure cooker. Those things just scared me.
I recognized that I needed to concede something, though. If I didn’t get an Instant Pot, I was going to be eating out of cans and talking to clowns, and there was no way I wanted to go back to that. Turns out there are a bunch of different models of Instant Pot, some more elaborate than others. As a confirmed tech geek, I picked the one that claimed Bluetooth connectivity. I think the theory was, the appliance could be networked to allow it to send a message to an app on my iPhone whenever the food was cooked or needed tending or whatever. Yeah, that didn’t work, but I didn’t really care. I get enough messaging traffic without my kitchen appliances texting me all the time.
It took me a while to learn to trust the Instant Pot. It sat in its packing case for about a week after it was delivered. Finally I opened it up and set it on the kitchen counter, where it sat for another week or so, not even plugged in. Remember I have always thought of pressure cookers as IEDs with friendly wrappers. I just wasn’t ready to light the fuse. My wife finally got tired of eating Domino’s pizza and microwaved ramen and told me to learn how to use that thing. I went and got the instruction manual and started reading. The more I read, the more I started to think maybe the Instant Pot wasn’t really going to murder me, and that maybe it might even be useful. One of the features I liked was the pressure safety. If pressure gets too high, it can outgas some steam so that it does not do anything antisocial.
The first thing I did with my Instant Pot was boil water. I think the manual even suggests that as a way to test the appliance without risking wasting food. It worked like a charm. Water got hot, and I somehow survived. So far, so good. The next thing I tried was making instant ramen. That’s essentially boiling water and then tossing some stuff in. Again, satisfactory results. I tried a few more recipes. Instant Pot macaroni & cheese, beef stroganoff, a couple of risotto dishes. All came out beautifully. I have used the slow cooker features of the Instant Pot to make pasta sauce, again with amazing results. One of my favorite dishes, puerco pibil, works really well, and cooks in a small fraction of the time I used to cook it in the oven. It uses pork shoulder as the principal ingredient. That is a cut of meat that takes 4–5 hours to get tender in the oven. The Instant Pot can pressure cook that to fall-apart tenderness in an hour flat.
I have now been using my Instant Pot for a little over a year. We still squabble. The other day, it burned some food. Not badly, but enough that the pot did not rinse clean. I had to put some real elbow grease into cleaning it up, but it was not that bad. I salvaged the dish, and it was still edible. I learned a thing or two about how to prevent sticking and scorching. It’s a process. I was recently even suggesting to my wife some ideas for options I might like to see on my next Instant Pot.
I will eventually get back to cooking with a stove. Believe me, the next time I look for an apartment, I am gonna make darn sure there’s a fume hood in the kitchen, and hopefully a smoke alarm not nearby. In the meantime, I am still having fun with my Instant Pot. It is showing signs of wear. I have no idea how long it will last, but it has been a good experience overall.
I think the big take-away from this is that parents should not let their kids out into the world with no useful household skills. Every teen should learn how to cook at least a handful of healthy, nutritious meals before leaving the only home they have ever known to go and try to live on their own. If you have a schedule that does not allow you the free time to nurse a dinner project for hours on end, you might want to pick up an Instant Pot and give it a try. After food is done cooking, the Instant Pot will even keep your food warm for you until you are ready to dig in. Oh, and I am in no way affiliated with Instant Pot, and am taking no money from them for this endorsement. I am just a really happy customer who’s wanting to let others know about something that could make their lives better.
