Pressure cooker

I used my new pressure cooker for the first time. First, I used it to quick-soak chickpeas. Quick-soaking normally takes 1-2 hours. (Soaking overnight, of course, takes 4-8 hours.) I never prepare chickpeas because I rarely plan ahead to that extent -- it's hard when you work full time. In the pressure cooker, it takes 4 minutes of cooking, plus an additional 2 or 3 to let the pressure come down. Amazing!

A cookbook I got for my birthday, Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure by Lorna Sass, which gives you lots of great recipes and charts with cooking times for pressure cooking beans, grains, and veggies, imparted a handy tip for seeing if your chickpeas are properly soaked: simply cut a few in half with a paring knife. If there's a dark spot in the middle, they're not done. If they're all one color, they're soaked.

After soaking the chickpeas, I used the pressure cooker to make Chickpea Soup Italiano, a recipe in Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. It was very easy: just add chickpeas, vegetables and herbs to boiling vegetable stock, close the cooker up, and cook for 16 minutes. Let the pressure subside, then simmer it while adding tomatoes blended with some of the chickpeas, salt, pepper, and vinegar. It was rustic and simple, but quite tasty. And would have taken an additional hour or two without the cooker.

I was quite scared of the cooker at first, but I'm starting to be more at ease with its gleaming, angry, hissing presence in my kitchen. It's going to make my life a LOT easier, especially on work nights. I strongly recommend getting one, especially if you eat a lot of legumes!

Culinary presents

I always get a few presents related to my cooking hobby. Here are the ones from this year:

1. A pastry brush, as a stocking stuffer. Neat! I've been needing one of those! My roommate and I have been using a tiny paint brush since we moved in to our first apartment three years ago, and, well, it's pretty inefficient.

2. Food Path: Cuisine Along the Grand Trunk Road from Kabul to Kolkata by Pushpesh Pant and Huma Mohsin. This is a really beautiful book with huge full-color photos and a lot of cultural and historical information along with the recipes. I'm looking forward to trying them out. A lot of them are meat-based, but they'll make for good exercises in substitution and adaptation.

3. A pressure cooker! Mom found one for 15 bucks at a yard sale, never used. I've been wanting one of these for a while. Raghavan Iyer swears by 'em and I am really looking forward to being able to cook unsoaked chickpeas in 48 minutes. Seriously! This modern world we live in! (Grandma was telling me they first came into vogue when she started out as a housewife, and whenever the ladies got together there was always a story about whose beans ended up on the ceiling. Heehee! It looks like there are enough safeties on this device that you'd have to do something pretty foolish to get yourself blown up, though.)

Other non-food highlights include the Monty Python's Flying Circus Collector's Edition, from Mom, and a subscription to the New Yorker, from my brother. Favorite presents I gave this year included a 15-year-old bottle of Laphroaig scotch for my dad (that was a joint purchase from me and Brian), hand-made portraits of a few of my friends' pets, a Yiddish alef-beyz book I've been working on for a few months for a friend who loves languages, and copies of my NaNoWriMo novel for the grandmas. (It is an economic year for handmade presents.)