Here’s the thing about me. I have a hard time making appropriate goals. I either overshoot or undershoot it. Or I have no idea what I should do with it. I bought an instapot (Instant Pot) several years ago. I mentioned yesterday that one of the things I want to do in the new year was to cook more. Or at all. This was back when instapots were the rage and peeople could not stop gushing about them. My brother had one, and he pushed me to get one.
I did my due diligence. I read up on instapots (what I call them), and everything I read made them seem like they would make cooking life a piece of cake (heh). All the recipes I read gushed about how life-changing it was to get an Instant Pot.
I was so eager to try it out, and the first thing I did was make mashed potatoes in it. That should have been simple enough, right? And I LOVE mashed potatoes.
Here’s the thing.
All the recipes assumed that you knew that you still had to prep the food and that you knew the instapot needed to be heated up first and then the pressure eased during cooking. This was not included in the ‘cooking’ time. So for something like mashed potatoes, there was no point using the instapot. In fact, it took twice as long to use the instapot than to do it in a saucepan.
The instapot came with a few quick and easy recipes including one for Kahlua pork or something like that. It had four ingredients and seemed really simple. It was for a family of four (which I am most emphatically not), so I quartered it. 2 pounds of pork instead of 8 for example. One of the ingredients was liquid smoke which I had never used in my life.
I had not read the recipe thoroughly beforehand. Here’s the thing. You had to brown the meat before putting it in the instapot. The recipe claimed you could do it in the instapot, but I could not figure it out. So I cut it up in quarters and browned it in a saucepan. And burned my forearm.
It was a mess. I also overcooked it. It tasted fine, but it was nothing spectacular, and it was more a pain in the ass than anything else.
When I talked about it with my brother, he said, “Of course you have to still do the prep and preheat it. And let the pressure out.” As if this was obvious. Which, to him, it was because he loved to cook and cooked a lot. It’s what I realized about the recipes as well. They were writen by people who cooked all the time, so they had a level of competency that they just assumed everyone had.
Back when Elden Ring came out, it was the new hotness. Before that, FromSoft was a niche developer. They were respected within the industry, but most people outside it had no idea who they were. Or they knew those Souls games were supposed to be hard.
I had a friend that wanted to play Elden Ring so she could be in on the big thing. I would consider it the most newbie-friendly of the From games. That doesn’t make it easy, though. And my friend showed this to be amply true. She was overwhelmed from the start, even with choosing a starting class. There are eight or ten of them (I don’t remember), but the descriptions are, ah, terse, shall we say. I started as the Confessor the first time. This is the flavor text for this class:
A church spy adept at covert operations. Equally adept with a sword as they are with incantations.
They come with two incantations–Urgent Heal and Assassin’s Approach. Plus a fingerseal (which you need to cast incantations) and a broadsword. I chose it because it was supposed to be a strengthcaster class for this game’s version of miracles (incantations).
Both these incantations are defensive ones. I knew that, but I just assumed I would get an offensive one farily soon. Or be able to do sorceries. Nope on both accounts. You can’t buy a staff until much later (you can find one, but you have to stumble over it. There are two places you can find one within a few hours if you hoon it), and you can’t buy any incantations for the first ten hours (I can tell you from experience) unless you get to RoundTable Hold. There’s an NPC there who will sell you basic incantations, including pyro. I almost wept. Seriously. I was thinking about starting over at the seven hour mark because I was so miserable. I did buy a bow, but bows in these games are shit.
Oh. Wait. My point. My friend tried. She really did. She asked me questions and I gave her as many tips as I could (general tips. I was playing the game at the same time she was, so my help was limited).
About a week in, she told me she was really struggling. I told her that she could quit! she didn’t have to play the game. It was ok! Which I think she did. Quit, I mean.
My point is that the game was easier by From standards, yes (at first, anyway), but that didn’t mean it was easy. And if you were a newbie who had no idea what the games were about, well, then you were screwed. There’s a common language you have to speak in order to play these games. Those of us who have played all of them for over a decade can forget how hard and esoteric they were when we first played them.
It’s like that with anything someone is good at, really. It’s only human to forget how hard it was in the beginning. WHen I first started learning Taiji, well, it wasn’t that hard for me to learn the Solo (Long) Form itself, but the concepts were difficult to grasp. As for Bagua, it’s so different from Taiji. It’s taking a bit of adjustment to get used to it.
I think cooking will be tthe same. People who do it on the regular forget that the basics aren’t obvious to those of us who don’t cook. I’m hoping to find ways to ease myself into it.