Regina has been busy modernizing and upgrading the cooking devices at our house. I have enjoyed cooking for years, but culinary advancements are about to leave me behind.
She even replaced our plain old dependable coffee maker with a new high-tech model. It has two pitchers, and the water is poured into one of them to be filtered before it goes into the coffee maker.
It takes up a big space on the cabinet, but the filtered water is supposed to make the coffee better. The water from one container spurts upward like a geyser into a filter before flowing into the coffee-brewing portion of the machine.
When our young granddaughters were staying at the house recently, they wanted to wake up early so they could watch the coffee thing work. They were fascinated that the water spewed up in one pot and flowed down in the other.
Regina also ordered some of that Le Creuset cookware for making soups, jambalaya and things like that. These pots are made of cast iron and covered with ceramic, and it takes two people to lift them from the cabinet to the stove.
I wouldn’t let the kids come in the kitchen when we were hoisting them onto the cooktop, because they could have had some bones crushed if we had dropped them.
On days when we cook in those pots, I don’t feel the need to go to the gym for a workout.
Another new item in our kitchen inventory is something called a Sous Vide. Immersed in a pot of water, the gadget will circulate it and control the temperature. That supposedly allows you to cook things to perfection in a plastic bag inserted into the heated water.
A cell phone app lets you operate the Sous Vide by remote control from wherever you happen to be. You can start supper while taking the kids to dance lessons or getting a haircut.
We also succumbed during the holidays to all the hype about Instant Pots and got one of those strange machines. We should have it figured out enough by next Christmas to cook in it.
The instructions for the Instant Pot are just a few pages longer than the operating manual for a Boeing 747.
Basically, the Instant Pot is an all-purpose appliance that has the capabilities to do searing, sautéing, pressure cooking, slow cooking and just about any other kind of food preparation imaginable.
Cooking was not just a necessity but also a source of great enjoyment for my mother, but she could never have adapted to things like the Instant Pot and the Sous Vide.
The black party-line phone mounted on her kitchen wall was not designed to turn on the Sous Vide while my mother was playing bridge across town, and the Instant Pot would have confused her.
Promotional materials that come with the Instant Pot refer to it as a multi-functional multi-cooker. My mother had one of those her whole adult life that she called a black iron skillet. It was handed down to her by her mother.
She had the pressure cooker part of an Instant Pot like most of the other ladies did in our neighborhood. They got them out every spring to cook down the berries for mayhaw jelly.
Then the cookers were used for canning in the summer when they filled Mason jars with tomatoes, beans, peas and other things from their backyard gardens.
But the skillet did all those other things the Instant Pot does and more. She seared pork chops in it, sautéed onions and squash and used it to fix pancakes or bacon and egg breakfasts every morning for years.
She filled the skillet with lard to fry chicken on the bone that she cut up herself and cooked white perch whole in it over open fires on creekbanks along Dorcheat and Bodcau Bayous.
Sometimes she would melt butter in the skillet, add brown sugar, eggs, flour and other things and put it in the oven to make one of her beautiful pineapple upside down cakes.
Just to keep up with the times, I plan to make some red beans and rice or chicken and spaghetti in the miraculous Instant Pot, which I think takes about four minutes.
But for serious cooking, I will keep using the black iron skillet that my grandmother handed down to my mother and that she left for us.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES