When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.
Most of the time, I grill over high heat. I like things to move fast. I like the sound and smell of a very hot fire. I gravitate towards dishes that you can get on and off the grill as quickly as possible. After a while, you'll know without thinking about it how hot the fire is.
Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.
For a two-job working family, a pressure cooker gets a meal on the table in seven to 15 minutes, start to finish.
Believe me, I understand the need for easy and speedy. After a 12-hour day of shooting 'Chopped,' say, I'm talking stir-fry, spaghetti, heck, peanut-butter sandwiches. But that's not about the joy of food. That's survival.
I was a short order cook in a pool hall in college. So, I am the fastest cook in the world.
Stuffing is evil. Stuffing adds mass, so it slows the cooking. That's evil because the longer the bird cooks, the drier it will be.
I want to bring things up to room temperature, especially poultry, before I cook it because I want it to cook faster so that there's less moisture loss.
Although a food processor is not an absolutely essential piece of equipment, because you can certainly chop, grate, slice, knead and mix everything by hand, it does do all these things very quickly and efficiently and saves you time and energy.
We are all victims of the marketing that says cooking is hard and takes too long, but that's simply not true. Scrambled eggs take five minutes to make.
With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not.
Repeatedly opening the oven - or worse, taking out the turkey to baste it - slows down the momentum of cooking.
On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)
