I Got an Instant Pot Last year, I picked up an Instant Pot multi cooker, thinking it would simplify cooking dinner on weeknights. Now that I’ve owned and used it for about 9 months, I’d like to share what I like about it, and what I don’t. For the record, I’m using the basic Instant Pot Duo 6-quart model. Capabilities I Use The Instant Pot is sort of like a Dutch Oven — it’s a thick-bottomed steel pot that can sauté, steam, and pressure cook food. And, much like a Dutch Oven, it’s very handy that quite a few recipes can be made in a single pot, which simplifies preparation and cleanup. ...

• cooking

Yesterday, I woke up and decided to try and make chicken stock from scratch. And, after another ten minutes of reflection, I further resolved to make it “from scratch” if at all possible. I rushed out the door to go grocery shopping, and grabbed the first set of ingredients: soup greens. Then, while I was at the butcher, I grabbed the second set of ingredients: chicken bones (prepackaged). (The bones ran me about $5, but my butcher charges a lot because they’re the only game in town; I’m pretty sure at other places it would be cheaper.) ...

• cooking

Lately, both my wife and I have been working long hours at our jobs; the health of our diets have suffered as a result. Although we have a few minutes each night to cook, we don’t have the time to run out to the market in the middle of the week, or to lavish time on a full-course meal. Whereas in years past I used to dictate the meal plan for the week and put two or three complex dishes into each weeks’ menu, that either my wife or I would simply make after arriving home from work, these days we scarcely even have time for that. We often just make pasta or chicken and call it a night. ...

• cooking

Peter Naur, famous in the programming world for his contributions to ALGOL and the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) notation for expressing grammars, passed away last week. (For those who are not in the programming world, ALGOL’s grammatical syntax inspired most of today’s most popular programming languages, like C, C++, Java, and Python). As a very young millennial programmer, I’d of course heard Naur’s name from the BNF notation, but didn’t really get to appreciate just how prescient his work was at the time. ...

• programming
• software-engineering
• cooking