Instant Pot disclaimer and possession by a crash test dummy

 

In the spirit of doing something different, I thought I'd give the Instant Pot I got for Christmas a whirl. I bought the ingredients for a beef stew, which in this case included pork, beef bones and some leftover chicken. Already, you can see I'm not following a recipe.

I'm used to making soup in a large pot on the stove top. This has always worked out well enough for me. I put the stove on high, boiling the water as I cut up the vegetables and meat, adding them as I go. By the time I've finished cutting everything up, it is going pretty good, and I can turn it down and add the spices. Then I leave it simmer for a couple of hours, stirring it and tasting it occasionally. If I need to add something, I will.

Instant Pot shouldn't be billed as Instant. It took the same amount of time to prep the food, and then there is an unknown amount of time before the timer starts while the pot builds pressure and temperature. Because I was making soup from beef bones, the recommendation was to pre-brown them in an oven for nearly an hour. You see where this is going?

The cook time was 75 mins. After an annoyingly messy venting process (that's not just steam, but vaporized fat and soup) I had to clean the cabinets above the pot. The warning should be "use only in a clear space about 4 feet in diameter." Alternatively, you could use the natural venting process, which could take an hour or so as the contents cool enough to reduce pressure.

Since I was making soup from bones, they also recommended to let the whole thing cool down enough to solidify the fat which would be scraped off the top. This meant it had to go into the fridge. For a long time. Like overnight. Next morning, there was still no layer of solidified fat, though the contents looked like they had cooled enough. I'm guessing the fat got vented out the top, or pressure may have infused it into the rest of the stew.

It came out rather bland. I wasn't able to adjust the seasoning as it cooked. It's a one shot deal. Maybe that's where the recipe would have come in handy.

There were some frozen chili leftovers from another time, which I microwaved, since I wasn't going to be eating the bland, allegedly fat-laden soup that night. I attempted to drink an Imperial Russian Stout with the chili, but I think I'm losing my ability to handle stouts. This one started making me ill, and I eventually gave up the idea in favor of a good old can of Coors. I never fully recovered from the nausea, though, and went to bed feeling poorly.

To lull myself to sleep I put on an audio book recording of Adyashanti's "Death: The Essential Teachings." It is a collection of various lectures on the subject from his semi-buddhist, non-dual perspective. Occasionally, when I listen to brainwash material such as this while I sleep, my brain will incorporate it into a dream, which I find very entertaining.

Enter the crash test dummy. I managed to glean from my dream that I somehow recognized Sharon's face, very much alive and in the form of a teenage heartbreaker, complete with big '80s hair and a devious smile. My heart leapt in my dream. Due to the programming going on subconsciously, I guess I asked her a question related to death and the survival of the individual.

By way of an answer, instead of words, I saw her face disappear and turn into a featureless anthropomorphic dummy with X's for eyes. I was disheartened for a moment, but I felt her saying, "Hold on, let's try this." 

And then the dummy kind of merged with me. It went from being in front of me to being absorbed into my entire body. I could feel it, or her, incorporating into my being. It was a feeling of fullness, and it made my heart and whole body thrill.

Unfortunately, I awoke at that point to the sound of Adya droning on about "ext-istential" this or that, and I was never able to re-enter the same dream state.

I'm not sure what essential teaching I was getting, exactly. That Sharon can actually exist in some form inside of my own consciousness or memory? But in a real, visceral way, not the Hallmark "They live on in our hearts as long as we remember them" kind of way. At least it felt real in the dream.

Or it could have been the chili.