Skip to main content

Precision

My parents like to cook, so they spend a fair bit of time working with recipes. My Mom likes to try new recipes, so it's not uncommon for her to decide to make a new recipe out of the blue. I've seen her make biriyani at home, for example. We don't have cultural roots in that part of the world, but she figured it'd be fun to make, so she tried her hand at it (I liked it well enough).

The interesting bit, though, is that they try to perfect certain recipes. Once they've tried it once or twice, they'll try to get the flavors and the textures just right. It often makes for some good meals, because these are people who care about how the food comes out. In general, that one fact tends to make the end result better.

The funny thing to me, though, has always been just how striving for perfection shows up in day-to-day life. Specifically, overhearing my parents talk about what they want to change for a particular dish leads to some comically precise discussions. My favorite example was when they were making some chicken dish, and they were discussing whether it should take seven minutes or eight minutes. Yeah, we're talking about 60 seconds, but there was a fairly passionate (in the "they were convinced it'd be better that way" sense, not in the "they yelled" sense) discussion about which was the correct cook time.

At the time, I just laughed about the whole thing and chalked it up to my parents' love for cooking. Well, there's a saying in Spanish: "no escupas al cielo porque a la cara te caera." It literally means, "don't spit at the heavens, lest it fall on your face," but the general gist of it is, "what goes around comes around."

Why is this relevant, you ask?
Because of this
You see, now that the Mild Wife and I own and frequently use an Instant Pot, we have to program in how long we want to cook things under pressure. In case you've never used a pressure cooker before, they cook items in less time than usual. The example we always give is you can cook beans in about 30 minutes, without even soaking them.

The compressed cook time is part of why we like the thing so much, but it also means that minutes matter. If we leave pot stickers in the Instant Pot for 4 minutes instead of 3 minutes, we get a different texture. It's noticeable enough where we have had actual discussions about how long to cook things in the Instant Pot.

I remember as we were legitimately having that discussion, I was reminded of my parents and their cook time discussions. I couldn't help but laugh at myself. No escupas al cielo, indeed.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...