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New Toy

This story starts out with a pretty innocuous event: a grocery run. We were going to host people at the Mild Abode, so we went to the store to pick up groceries. The Mild Wife had actual done a really good job of planning ahead, so we didn't need to pick up tons of items. Still, we didn't have every last item we needed for the shindig, so we headed to the store.

Now, I don't really remember all of the items we needed, but we did want to buy a bigger rice cooker. You see, the Mild Wife and I usually just cooked for ourselves, so it's not like we needed mountains of rice for the two of us. However, making enough rice for a party using our small rice cooker would've meant having to cook several batches, and therefore spend forever cooking. No, we decided. We would rather just get a bigger rice cooker and make it all in one go.

We actually had two stops to make, and the rice cooker was supposed to be a purchase from the second stop. However, when we were walking through the aisles of the first store, we came upon an Instant Pot. What is an Instant Pot, you say? Well, that's precisely what we spent a bunch of time trying to figure out in the aisle.

We'd never seen one before, though we were familiar with the concept of pressure cookers. The packaging on this didn't exactly say, "THIS IS A PRESSURE COOKER," so we took a couple of minutes trying to figure out exactly what the item in question did. Then, once we figured out that it was a pressure cooker, we took even longer trying to figure out whether we needed one or not. Our mission was to find something to cook rice, after all. Could this Instant Pot cook rice for us and would we be okay with how it cooked it?

In the middle of our discussion, several other patrons joined in on the discussion. I'm not even kidding, I think like three different, unrelated shoppers stopped to ask us if we had one or to provide commentary about whether or not it would be a good purchase. I felt like we made a bunch of friends just standing there talking about the Instant Pot.

Ultimately, we did end up buying it, and we were quite happy with how the rice came out. Heck, we also tried cooking brown rice in it and it came out pretty well. All in all, it served as a capable substitute for a rice cooker.

Of course, if all we did was cook rice with this new pressure cooker, that'd be a waste. So, we tried cooking other things. We made beans and chili a couple of times, and we liked the way they came out both times. We've also used it to "stew" apples so that we could use them for baked goods. I don't think we've had a bad cooking experience yet (knock on wood). The beauty, of course, is that we can prepare some of these items with far less effort and cooking time than before. If we made a pot of beans before, it would've taken hours. Now, we can be done with it in at most an hour, and we don't have to watch over the stove during that time.

We're planning on moving on to stews and other items in said Instant Pot, but it's become quite the source of glee in the Mild Abode. It's almost like Christmas came early this year.

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