All drawings and paintings start off abstract. What I love about this painting is all the abstracted shapes you can see on the pots when you zoom into them. It’s so interesting to see the variety of colours that are captured from the surrounding area and how they are made visible on the metallic, curved surfaces. The pots are obviously the main aspect of the painting and they absorb almost all of the detail from within the environment and reflect it back to us. I think the pots contrast so well with the lighter background and this provides a wonderful balance in composition, value, shapes and scale. So far, this is my favourite piece.
Now, this blog isn’t just about Art. It’s about my life to a certain extent. I don’t know if you have ever seen a pressure cooker before today or if you have ever used one, but they can be quite handy in a kitchen (you have to be careful though). You can cook food in half the time or less. You add food to the pot, some water, some seasoning and then cook for a certain period of time. How it works is that the water boils in the pot which causes extreme pressure to build up via steam. This steam is slowly released through a weighted instrument on top of the lid, which controls the pressure within the pot (the heat also controls the pressure. More heat = more steam = more pressure). In this way the food cooks at higher temperatures resulting in shorter cooking times.
This is the first pressure cooker that I have ever owned and I bought it about a year ago because I wanted to be more time efficient in the kitchen. Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking, when I have nothing else to do. However, i want to spend more time on my artwork, so by reducing my time in the kitchen helps. Basically, cooking with a pressure cooker makes my life more convenient. I can illustrate this with an example. When I would make hummus I would soak a batch of chickpeas/garbanzo beans overnight. Then I would boil them for two and a half hours, allow them to cool and then process the chickpeas with olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic (I don’t use tahini). Now with a pressure cooker I can cook the chickpeas in under twenty minutes. How great is that!!! SO MUCH TIME SAVED. You can cook vegetables under 8mins and chicken under 20mins. The possibilities are endless.
The other reason I felt confident enough to buy a pressure cooker (you may be thinking why does a person need confidence to buy a pressure cooker, I’ll get to that) was because growing up we were familiar with the presence of a pressure cooker in the kitchen. In fact our culture. Mum used a pressure cooker all the time. In India a pressure cooker it is an essential piece of equipment to have. I’ve also noticed a lot of people use them in China and in Caribbean cultures. So, when you use a pressure cooker for the first time it is quite intimidating. Reading through the instruction manual I could see the emphasis being heavily placed on the safety of using the product. At end of the day it’s a pressure cooker and the amount of pressure that builds inside of it is quite considerable. You don’t want to be anywhere near it if it explodes. Hence, the emphasis on safely operating it. I was confused looking at the lid because it didn’t look anything like my mums pressure cooker, but then again she has an old “whistle” style pressure cooker, which is another aspect of pressure cooker life that I’m not going to get into right now. My lid has three knobs on it. The main one was where the steam is released and the other two are safety valves. They will shoot off the lid if there is a dangerous amount of pressure build up within the pot etc. Anyway, to cut a very long story short, a traditional style pressure cooker (which is the one I have, even though it’s new) is very loud and scary if you have never operated one yourself. A newer version of the pressure cooker is called an Instant Pot and it has a digital panel which allows you to input the cooking settings on the pot, much like a microwave, but not like a microwave.
And there you have it. An brief insight into my pressure cooking life. I might write a book on it one day and I’ll call it “The Taste of Pressure.......Cooking”.