using my hammer

You don't use a wrench when you need a hammer.

So said my wise Dad. There is a proper tool for every job. Well, except maybe for that utility player: the pliers.

You know all about my new Utility Pot -- the 21st century answer to the traditional pressure cooker (not that kind of pot, canadians). I have been holding off on rolling it out for its initial mission. And I have two excuses. Or had.

The young man from Estafeta snatched the first from my preparation table this afternoon. The Instant Pot's lid is designed for its pressure-intensive specialty. But, if you want to use any of the multitudinous other functions, you can buy a glass lid -- just like a regular pot that has no instant delusions.

I ordered one along with the Instant Pot. The pot arrived on Friday night. The lid arrived today.

That left just one excuse. Because the Instant Pot is a special tool, I took my Dad's advice in using it only as it is intended. That means learning a bit about its concepts.

After a bit of research, those-in-the-Illuminati highly recommend a concept cookbook for Instant pots. That is exactly what I need. There is plenty of information on the internet. But most of the recipes sound as if they started life either as filler in Better Homes and Gardens or as leftovers from old crock pot cookbooks.

So, I ordered the book. According to my package tracker, it will arrive on Friday. If experience is prelude, DHL will have it to me earlier. But only after notifying me of its premature delivery.

I had planned on testing the Instant Pot with a simple rice and pork dish. Today I purchased a very nice piece of pork tenderloin. But, my church friend (and fellow Instant Potter) Dennis warned me that lean cuts of meat are better cooked elsewhere.

And the food angel was with me today. Our local grocer, Hawaii, gets new produce on Sundays. I was looking for something interesting to accompany the pork in the Instant Pot. There was some young asparagus. Oyster mushrooms. Habaneros.

The produce section is a dangerous place for my attention span. The discovery of a new item almost always makes me forget what my purpose is in being there. And it happened again today.

I found a container of snow peas. For you in the north (and maybe elsewhere in Mexico), the discovery of snow peas would not be remarkable. Here in the tropics (in summer weather), it was a find as rare as discovering an honest Red Chinese security official.

That, of course, changed my food plans. When Nika Hazelton was the food editor at National Review, she confessed that she considered choosing a recipe and then shopping for the ingredients was the equivalent of Soviet economics. Her preferred shopping method was to find what was fresh and interesting and then turn it into an interesting dish. I refer to it as the free market libertarian approach to cooking.

And I did just that. I scurried home with my snow peas and some other vegetables with no real recipe in mind.

But I knew to preserve the freshness of the snow peas, there was only one method of cooking. Stir-frying.

The Instant Pot was out. Even though there are stir-fry recipes aplenty online, they all sound like what far too many people consider stir-fry. Dump a lot of vegetables (preferably out of a freezer bag) into a skillet and cook it into a gelatinous goo. The type of travesty that appears to be de rigueur in local Chinese restaurants here. Using the Instant Pot would be like using a wrench as a hammer.

You may recall I told you about my cooking school service under the much-feared Dragon Lady, Linda Chan (stirring the pot). Her classes were a real challenge, but I learned a lot from her.

One of the concepts I developed under her tutelage was a class of stir-fry I labeled either as Imperial or Forbidden City. It is based on vegetables with the same major colors as the Imperial palaces and temples. Red. Purple. Yellow. Green. And because it is color-based, the arrangement of vegetables is different each time.

These dishes often take their names from the meat they contain. Phoenix and Dragon being one of the most popular. If I am being grand, I will combine four of my favorite proteins -- pork tenderloin, chicken breast, shrimp, and beef.

I did not need to be grand today. I had a beautiful piece of pork tenderloin ready to star in the Instant Pot. Instead I repurposed it to star in a stir fry with a supporting cast of red and green bell peppers, purple cabbage, red onion, garlic, yellow habaneros, green serranos, yellow carrots, green celery, red tomatoes, mushrooms, and, of course, those extremely rare (and not-too-expensive) snow peas.

The sauce was simple -- to let the freshness of the layered vegetable flavors play on one another. Soy sauce, fish sauce, and sake.

It was the best stir-fry I have eaten in perhaps a decade. And I can cook up a great stir-fry. The two hours it took to prepare and cook were worth every minute.

And it is healthy -- sticking with my far-better diet I have created for myself during the past four months. I fast from 6 PM until 2 PM the next day. During the four-hour eating period I eat two meals. A portion of stir-fry and a bowl of homemade soup for lunch. For dinner, I usually eat a salad and maybe some stir-fry. For a snack, celery and carrots along with a bit of hummus. But only tea and water during my fast.

When the concept book arrives for the Instant Pot, I will see what healthy options are available. That pork and brown rice casserole sounds tempting. Perhaps with a tougher piece of pork that would benefit from the massaging ministrations of pressure cooking.

Since I am talking about health, I have been laid up for a couple of weeks with tendinitis (we think; my doctor seems to be better at selling medicine than at diagnosing ailments) in my left knee. While I was convalescing my blood pressure decided my knee was getting too much attention.

But my doctor released me yesterday for limited walking. I trust with the fasting, the new diet, and exercise, I will get everything under control again. It is inevitable that the mileage (and age) is going to have an effect on the chassis.

And who knows what the right tool is for that?