[Leica] rice cookers, disease, how to cook steel cut oats, and tina's picture

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

Sonny --

First of all you should know you can't talk about recipes, cooking,
utensils, plastic containers, or pretty much anything touching on food or
drink without the disease-niks leaping up with grave warnings of imminent
death.  Once the topic of new poisons/diseases/bacterias/viruses is (very
temporarily) exhausted they get in their cars and drive home on the
highways...... while we all breath the air this produces, without
discussion.  Or stop breathing it, if we end up one of the hundreds of
thousands who die in car accidents every year.

Flannery O'Connor had a great line about a character in one of her stories:
"Of diseases, she preferred the lingering and incurable."

Meanwhile, I don't particularly like big energy-suckin' all-day electric
appliances and on steel cut oats I can offer a super low-energy quick and
easy technique we use at my house: put on the oats before bed, bring to a
boil, turn off, cover (3 minutes total). Then sleep. Then get up and get
them hot and eat 'em. Total time spent cooking is about five minutes. It's
my girlfriend who taught me this (she lived in Ireland for a few years with
a good IRA man who would -- in those days -- have preferred to go by gunshot
than a starch-bacillus I bet) and she's a big time disease-nik -- my
toothbrush was poisonous, it turned out -- so I cannot possibly let word
slip that leaving them starches out might kill her.

Tina's photograph is great, btw. Classically beautiful. I took a moment off
from the rice discussion to give it a look.......

Vince P