We got an Instant Pot for Christmas, since everyone has to have an Instant Pot. What is it? Why, it's a slow cooker.
I love the concept of the Instant Pot, the slow cooker. From now on, when my wife wants me to fix something, I'll say, "In an instant!" and then get around to it 10 hours later.
I'm sure the Pot does some things in an Instant, like take up space — the thing's the diameter of a WW I artillery shell — but for now I'm happy with it. The device has certain salient features:
1. It has Bluetooth. You can monitor it from your phone. I can't tell you how much this feels like the future: In the old days, you had to get right up to the slow cooker and push buttons. With your fingers. This is the 21st century. We don't operate things with our crude meat sticks. We use our phones. Now I can stand 6 feet away and control the temperature.
This also means you get a notification that says your phone has lost its connection to the slow cooker, a surreal combination of time and space. It's like someone in 1943 getting a telegram telling them their radio is no longer talking to the oven.
2. It makes yogurt. Perhaps in an instant, I don't know. It's possible it makes yogurt so quickly the clocks in your kitchen go backward.
It's great that it makes yogurt, because I'm tired of going to the store and seeing the line snake out the door and into the parking lot: "Oh, no, the yogurt line is horrible this month. It comes every fourth Monday, and people start to queue at daybreak. Then they run out and there are fights. We all remember the Dannon Massacre of '15, when the dairy department stock boys waded into the crowd with clubs to disperse them."
3. It's a pressure cooker. This, frankly, makes me nervous, mainly because I don't know what I'm talking about. I imagine that people who do know their way around a kitchen have conversations like this:
