instant pot enlightenment

April 23rd, 2018 - 7 Comments

I didn’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. What I asked for was a slow cooker. When I said “slow cooker” I envisioned the brown ceramic Crock-Pot my mother filled with pork chops and a can of condensed mushroom soup in the morning before work. I’m good with slow.

I usually scale down what I ask for because gifts for me tend to get scaled up. Once I asked for a juicer and got a stainless steel “citrus press” that stands 14 inches high. I asked for a 10-inch fry pan and got a 15-inch skillet. I asked for a soup ladle and got a professional grade combination ladle and strainer with a handle so long that it won’t fit in a drawer. I use all these things, but I have a small house and kitchen that gets teenier every Christmas.

So when I saw the two-foot tall box under the tree I held my breath. It was the last gift I unwrapped. It wasn’t a slow cooker. It was my worst fear: an instant pot. I needed it like I needed another ladle.

A week later I still hadn’t opened the box. When I did, I was wary. It had a lot of packing material and instructions in several languages. My husband reassured me it wasn’t that complicated. And it was the highest rated model he could find. I might have asked for what I wanted, but I hadn’t wanted nearly enough.

I waited until he cleared one of our three gourmet coffeemakers from the counter before I installed it. And then I trolled Facebook looking for real people who had used the thing successfully. The first weeks of the year were full of postings from first-time instant pot users, posts of the “live to tell” variety. I found one from a friend and went right to the recipe she had used: butter chicken.

I tried it. I loved it. Everyone loved it. And that’s all I needed to keep going. I’ve attained instant pot enlightenment, and here’s what I’ve learned:

1. It’s not complicated. Never mind the 14 function buttons lined up on the front of my Instant Pot Duo Plus. I don’t want to make cake or porridge or yogurt. I want to make dinner, and to do that I have only ever used two functions: sauté and pressure cook.

2. It’s not that big, not as tall as a citrus press, for instance.

3. It saves time to cook, but not necessarily the time for cooking. You still have to prep the ingredients, and you might have to shop for specific ingredients more often.

4. It’s fun. I’ve been the cook for at least four nights a week for the last 21 years. So I needed a jolt to my system.

5. There are a lot of recipes out there. Some of them are faster ways to make old favorites like pot roast, chili or tomato soup; others are things you never thought you’d make, like Indian food. The Instant Pot has revolutionized traditional at-home Indian cooking with its time bound methods to achieve complex flavors. (I read that in a magazine article.) I usually start looking for a recipe using things I have on hand and want to use up, like too many sweet potatoes, carrots, or tomatoes.

6. Season it up. The pressure cooker nukes your seasonings. My favorite recipe is for a quick pot roast that sounds like something my mom would have made: it uses a packet of old-fashioned onion soup mix for flavoring.

By now you might have an instant pot sitting on top of your refrigerator. Time to haul it down and fire it up. People ask where I get my instant pot recipes. I get them instantly, but I can still save you a second or two of trouble. These are some the recipes that I have or definitely would make twice.

Beef Stew
Butter Chicken
Chicken and Pea Risotto
Chicken Biryani
Curried Carrot Red Lentil Soup
Curried Sweet Potato Lentils
Ground Beef Chili
Kale with Garlic and Lemon
Lemon Vegetable Risotto
Mongolian Chicken
Mulligatawny Soup
Palak Paneer
Spicy Cauliflower Soup
Pot Roast
Sweet Potato Chicken Curry
Tomato Soup

half the parent, half the child

May 7th, 2015 - 16 Comments

I had a bad morning the other day. Something unexpected happened, and in the span of five minutes, my future unraveled, my schemes died, and the only way forward seemed straight off a cliff. In other words, I had to change my plans. On the drive to school, I told my daughter what was going on and how it could affect her. I said this while I was driving in circles, making wrong turns and getting lost. She was quiet and let me be. At midday I got a text from her.

What are you going to do?

I don’t know, I replied.

Just do what you need to do. I will support you.

This is where I might congratulate myself for raising such a wise and compassionate child, with the emotional intelligence and resilience instilled by conscious parenting, who returns the unconditional love and acceptance I’ve given her.

Only she isn’t, because I don’t.

She doesn’t speak to me as I have spoken to her; she speaks to me as she wishes I would speak to her. She doesn’t mirror who I am, she shows me a person I can become. And if I am the slightest bit charitable in my recollections, I must concede that she has been doing this all along with clear-eyed consolations.

It’s not always going to be easy.

I am thankful for my life.

Everyone makes mistakes.

I never get mad when you don’t do your best.

It takes more practice.

Everything happens when you don’t expect it.

By fair assessment, I am only half the parent she is, and she is only half the child I perceive her to be. I can’t parcel the roles out one way or the other. I only know that in the midst of a dark and lonely trial, my pain is shattered by an innocent utterance, and life is born anew.

The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch. One more thing someone said to me once.

To my dear mother and all mothers before, to my daughter and all daughters to come, I leave this promise and conviction: Your babies will be okay. Together we find the way.

***

Just in time, there are copies of Momma Zen on giveaway here.

mashed potatoes plus one

May 5th, 2015 - 9 Comments

A tribute to mothers.

It strikes me as best to begin with love. The word will never again mean so much.

Of course you love your spouse. You love your parents and brothers and sisters. You love your friends. You love your home, and perhaps your hometown. You love your dog. You may love your work. You might attest to loving your alma mater, mashed potatoes or reading on a rainy day.

But this is love. The feeling you have for your child is so indescribably deep and consuming that it must qualify as one of the few transcendent experiences in your plain old ordinary life. It occurs spontaneously as part of afterbirth. It is miraculous and supreme and irrevocable. It makes all things possible.

There is a certain attitude, perhaps unavoidable, that most of us seem to adopt as we grow up. It is a kind of self-satisfied conclusion that our parents didn’t love us. Oh, they might have loved us, but they didn’t love us enough. They didn’t love us the right way. They didn’t love us just so. Have your own child and you will penetrate into the utter absurdity of that idea. You will love your child as your parents loved you and their parents loved them. With a love that is humbling and uncontrived, immense and indestructible. Parents err, of course, and badly. They can be ignorant, foolish, mean and far worse, in ways that you can come to forgive in them and try to prevent in yourself. But this wholesale shortage of parental love at the crux of everyone’s story must be the product of shabby and self-serving recollections. Now that you are a mother, set that story aside, forgetting everything you thought you knew about love.

When my daughter was born, I saw my husband fall in love for the first time. He is a good and loyal man, and he loves me. But he has never lost his footing with me, not in the goofy, tumbledown way he surrendered on first sight to his baby girl.

Within days of bringing our tiny daughter home, my husband took dibs on the nighttime feedings. Born six weeks early, she had mastered bottle-feeding in the hospital nursery but was weak and reluctant at the breast. There was a double bed crowded into our nursery, a relic of its days as a guest room, and there he slept, inches away from the mews, rasps and mysterious eaps that emanated from her crib. He slept there eagerly and even well, waking every three hours to dispense her bottles. Although most nights I was waking too, like a shell-shocked soldier, to pump my raw and weeping breasts, the nights belonged to him.

So intense were his affections that I was jealous. Not jealous of him, jealous of her. He was hurrying home in the late afternoons to see her. Calling home hourly to check on her. Cradling her in the warm hollow of his chest for that last hour of sleep at dawn’s early light. How could he possibly love an old, tired, slob of a frump like me anymore? I looked at my love struck husband, looking at her, and raised an eyebrow. read more

unhatched

April 8th, 2013 - 4 Comments

I was going to write a special post a month before Mother’s Day and put it up today. I marked my calendar. Collected info. Jotted down some ideas. But I’ve decided I can’t. Or rather, I won’t. Looking at the matter closely, I see that it’s one more thing I don’t really need to do.

Here’s the deal: I spend way too much time troubling with what comes next. Thinking ahead. Hatching a scheme. Nagging, pushing, poking. Trying to produce something, make a difference, get a result.

I was going to ask you to buy my books. And say nice things about them on Amazon or Goodreads. Recommend them to friends. Come to a retreat. Do something for me. But I’d like to take a little break from that. My special post is this post instead.

I’ve noticed that most of my problems—my conflicts and disappointments—are because I’m trying to get somebody to do something I want. Only rarely do I realize that I don’t have to do that. Because everything truly wonderful (except most clean laundry and occasional meals) appears before me ready made.

Like this.

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Custom Bird’s Nest Talisman Necklace by Wendy Cook

Something truly wonderful, ready made for you to give to any mother, sister, or friend for Mother’s Day. The perfect reminder that the eggs always hatch when they are ready.

what you won’t get

May 6th, 2011 - 6 Comments

You’ll get breakfast in bed. A flower on your tray. Dinner out. A card, a call. Maybe one less upset. If not, an apology. And if you’re truly blessed, you’ll get some time to yourself, when you can consider everything you won’t get, and what no one else can give you for Mother’s Day:

What You Already Have
A quick burst of introspection and inspiration in this new interview on Painted Path

What You Already Know
A free download of the mini-book 23 Things You Might Not Know About You (but to be perfectly honest, you already do) courtesy of Zen at Play

Where You Already Are
Basic instructions in how to stay from Walking on My Hands.

Happy Mother’s Day. I know. I understand. Me too.

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The perfect I-don’t-want-to-be-the-Mother-day gift

April 19th, 2009 - 8 Comments

When talk turns to Mother’s Day, I get a wobbly tummy. I’ve always been remembered nicely, but I’d really rather be forgotten totally.

And although I’m often ignored around here, I’m hardly ever completely overlooked.

When my husband spends $75 for a bouquet of flowers, I inhale deeply, and then I just about wilt. Because what I really want for Mother’s Day is a day when I don’t have to be the Mother.

That’s why the Momma Zen Mother’s Day Gift Guide has just one thing on it: You. Coming here. For an I Don’t Have to Be the Mother Day. Surrounded by my very best friends and fellow mothers at the Mother’s Summer Plunge one-day retreat on Saturday, June 20.

Everything you’ll need to make it happen is right here.

I know, it can be hard to imagine your family getting by without you, but they probably won’t give you a single second thought.

Whether you are treating yourself by your presence or treating your family by your absence, it’s an all-around treat just the same. So sign up by May 31.

Use this downloadable gift certificate and tell your husband that this year’s Mother’s Day shopping is just how he likes it. Done.
Mothers Plunge Gift Certificate

The mother at the end of my block

April 7th, 2009 - 4 Comments

Just a few months after my daughter’s birth, I saw another mother on the corner at the end of my block. – Momma Zen

Amy Tiemann’s second edition of Mojo Mom is born today. It is an updated compendium of thoughtful questions and resources about rebuilding a healthy life after you become a mother. I just read it for the first time, although it was the second time. That’s what I’m told the second birth is like: not like the first, which you can’t remember anyway.

There is a story about me and Amy that I’m not sure she knows. And the story is this: she is the mother I met at the end of my block. We all have this mother. Another mother that you meet in a jolt of recognition in those first desolate months, the other mother to whom you will reveal yourself in the mutual reflection of empathy and acceptance. The mother with an extra ziplock bag of Cheerios in her stroller when yours have run out just as you start the steep homeward climb.

Amy was that mother not for the birth of my baby, although our daughters were born within weeks of one another. Amy is the mother I met on my block for the birth of my book.

A few months before the birth of Momma Zen, I started casting a crazed daze about the neighborhood. I’d started and finished the project in a creative cocoon, oblivious to what was already out there, unaware of what anyone else had written first or best. I highly recommend cocoons for all transformative processes. It is nature’s perfect way and thankfully requires no recommendation from me.

I ordered Amy’s book, her baby, just to confirm that it was not my own. We can all envision the movie-of-the-week hysteria that would overtake us should someone else leave the hospital with our baby! I read her book to check for family markings: the ear lobes, the nose, the big toe, and came away convinced. She had hers; and I had mine.

In the years since I have confirmed that and more. Amy has her own inimitable approach to this bottomless topic of life as a mother. She has a scientist’s mind, a seeker’s eye and a mother’s heart. She is overwhelmingly generous, kind and reassuring. If I am the priest at your bedside, she is the doctor. Believe me, you want to see the doctor well before the priest arrives.

In her book, Amy asks the questions we may be afraid to ask ourselves. They are practical, not spiritual, but can seem quite impossible and intangible in the early years. Questions about work, time, space, money, childcare, self-care, power and politics. Mojo Mom will leave you energized and activated, not agitated and polarized, as so much mommy talk can.

As life would have it, as it always will, Amy and I have walked these blocks, these years, in each other’s continuous company. With mutual respect and humor. As life would have it, as it always will, we will soon be walking the blocks in my very neighborhood when Amy comes to visit me in June. She and I will host a Mother’s Summer Reading Salon at Sierra Madre Books on Tuesday, June 23.

Can you believe it? I can’t, but I can trust this life exactly as it unfolds, as surely as you can trust yours and everyone in it.

Buy Amy’s book for any mother on your block this Mother’s Day. The block is both bigger and smaller than you think, and no one walks it alone.

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karen maezen miller

paradise in plain sight

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