Experiment With the Pressure Off

For months, it tantalized me. Cooked beans in an hour? Mouthwatering, fork tender meat? Sumptuous stocks? A yogurt setting? Oh, yes. I had my eye on a Instant Pot pressure cooker. But I hesitated, because I associated “pressure cookers” with “literal kitchen explosions” (Instantpots are actually very safe; it’s the more old-fashioned stove top models that are the real culprits). I broke down and bought one in a Black Friday or Cyber Monday splurge, but even then, it took me some time to get comfortable with it. I couldn’t come up with a recipe, get down to work, and toss everything into the metal insert without first poring over the manual, experimentally fiddling with the valve on top, and scratching my head trying to figure out how to translate what I wanted to do into this new world of pressurized cookery.

Trying something new in the kitchen is an impulse you’re well served cultivating, but it comes with some notable drawbacks. Namely, if the experiment fails, and the food is inedible, it’s pizza time (with the indignity of still having to do the dishes). When I get home from a long day of work, what I need is to pull from my repertoire, dishes that I can make with hardly a thought. Stir fries, meat with a pan sauce and a side of veggies, a Thai coconut curry, pasta and sauce. I always keep the building blocks of my repertoire in the house, along with condiments to spice them up, and they serve me well. The same goes for cooking for others for the first time; if I’m making food for a potluck or hosting dinner guests, it’s not time for a recipe that’s alien to me.

One of the practices that has most transformed my cooking, then, was the realization that I could cook food even when I wasn’t hungry or it wasn’t time for a meal. Radical, right? But without my stomach grumbling, or guests on their way, the pressure is off. I don’t have much experience working with dough, for example, which can be extraordinarily finicky and relies much more on instinct and experience to perfect than most cooking, which is more forgiving. So I have gone ahead and made pie crusts and pasta dough without any specific purpose in mind, thinking of them as a fun weekend project that’d keep me away from a computer screen. If everything turns out well, I might have myself a couple easy dinners later that week. If not, I can toss it away or foist it on less discriminating friends, shrug my shoulders, and move on.