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minestrone made in an InstantPot
Monday, December 9 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
In recent months I've tried to prepare a meal on the two days a week that Gretchen works at the bookstore so that she can come home to a nice warm meal at the end of a day of bookselling. It's a job she loves, but she doesn't also want to have to cook dinner after working it. For me, cooking is entirely instrumental. I do not consider it an art or anything to be especially proud of. I'm not particularly interested in variety or even nutritional content. I just want to make something that tastes reasonably good that fills a belly. So I only have a repertoire of three dishes: chili, pasta with red sauce, and pizza (and that last one is fairly new!). In the past (say, half my life ago) my go-to was pasta stir fry, but that's a bit too fusion for Gretchen's palate. This morning before she left for work, Gretchen asked if I might ever be interested in making something from a recipe. I'm a stick in the mud about such things and was initially reluctant. But when I heard that the proposed new dish was minestrone soup made entirely in an InstantPot, I said sure, I'd give it a try. So a little after 4:00pm today, I started working my way through the recipe with the aim of following it fairly closely. After scanning it, I realized I needed to do some prep work first, so I cut up the garlic, carrots, and celery. (I'm not a fan of cooked carrots, so I cut them into small pieces so their flavor would be better lost in the noise of others.) There's a stage early in the process where the InstantPot is put into sauté mode so that it acts as a frying pan for the garlic and a tiny amount of oil. So I decided to increase the amount of oil and fry up some red onions and mushrooms in there too, which is similar to how I begin preparing my three other go-to dishes. At some point one adds the carrots & celery, a can of beans, a can of diced tomatoes, four cups of broth (which I figured out how to make from boullion, which I'd never cooked with before), and a cup of some small pasta shape (in this case orecchiette). The recipe called fore both red pepper flakes and black pepper in surprisingly large amounts, which I measured by eyeballing in a conventional spoon instead of a measuring spoon. But there's a reason people use measuring spoons; it's hard to eyeball a quarter of the volume of an oval dish. So the soup ended up a little spicier than expected. It was plenty good this way, though when Gretchen ate it she had to add some vegan yoghurt to cool it down a bit.
Another thing I worked on today was a mini project to simplify the web interface of my ESP8266 Remote Control system. All the things one can do with it has led to a proliferation of tabs, particularly after I added a crude means of sending infrared commands to be blinked at a remote device. The solution to this was to add a tab called "Etc" and place all the little-used tabs under that so that the interface isn't too cluttered when doing the more mundane things: controlling devices, running reports, and performing utilities. (The weather and inverter data graphs were already on separate pages without any of those tabs.)
Another thing I did today was make a report with a graphical output showing the value of the Analog 0 pin on the SolArk Co-pilot controller. This, as I mentioned yesterday, has a linear relationship to the 12v battery voltage, which in turn has a relationship (a fairly non-linear one) to how much capacity the battery has remaining. By looking at the graphical output of this report, I will eventually get a sense of what the number is that corresponds to true depletion. If, for example, I cannot start the generator, that's pretty depleted. Fortunately at that point I am not out of options, since now I can attach a larger marine battery entirely remotely.
For the past day or more, Gretchen has been wanting to get fecal and urine samples from Neville so he can be tested for parasites. (Charlotte was recently found to be infested with hook worms.) But today he just lay on the couch all day, apparently never having to poop or piss. At one point I carried him outside and plopped him down in front of the house in the rain, hoping he would at least piss. But all he did when he was out there was eat some slushy snow. Later tonight, though, Gretchen was able to get a urine sample after waiting around for something like ten minutes in the rain.
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