Fielder

Obviously times and gadgets have changed since I used to actually cook meals.

I was wandering around the small-appliance department of a large store looking for something to cook asparagus in. I used to have some sort of double boiler, but it apparently left home with one of my children. Admittedly, it’s been a few years since I had a need for it, but Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe was generous enough to bring me some of the bounty from her garden, and I wanted to see if fresh vegetables had changed any since the last time I saw a black-eyed pea in its natural state.

Living alone lends itself to eating odd things at strange times. Frozen dinners are OK, but most of the time it is simply too much trouble to peel back that film or fold the box into some intricate design for nuking.

So I find myself eating whatever is at hand. I have become ad­dicted to vinegar-and-salt potato chips and Irish Cream, or an old standby from childhood, a slice of bread wrapped around a dill pickle. I have not found a wine that goes well with this entree.

At the store I found juicers, rice cookers, panini mak­ers, quesa­dilla makers, slow cookers, convection cookers and toasters. I didn’t find anything that claimed to cook asparagus to perfection.

But it reminded me of the cooking tools I used when my children were young and endlessly hungry. I cooked in vats and huge stewpots and once made jelly in a bucket.

One of my favorite cooking vessels was a pressure cooker. I don’t know if anyone uses them anymore, but I made barbecue in one.

I’d put a roast inside and throw in a bottle of barbecue sauce. Then I’d seal it up and ad­just the little gadget on the end and wait for it to start making that chu-chu-chu-chu-chu sound that meant the doohickey was allowing enough built-up pressure to escape to avoid an explosion.

If it chu-chu-chued too fast, you had to turn the fire down. At the end, I carefully unsealed the lid and had enough tender, barbecue-sauce-infused meat to satiate my herd of carnivores.

One day I was visiting Mom and decided to surprise her. I rooted around in her cabinet and found the pressure cooker. I added the meat and sauce and set the thing a-chuing.

Somehow, after that I became distracted. I left the pot in Mom’s all-white kitchen unattended. And the pressure built. And built.

Now the good thing about a pressure cooker is that it has a little rubber seal on the end of the doohickey that will melt at a certain temperature, avoiding a dangerous explosion. The bad thing about that little rubber seal is that, once it melts, whatever is in­side rapidly is propelled by the pressure at whatever the doohickey is pointing at.

In this case it was Mom’s pristine white ceiling.

The noise brought me at a dead run. Barbecue was dripping from the ceiling and running in greasy rivulets down the walls. The floor was slippery with it, and it oozed off the cabinets and puddled on the kitchen table. I had to use a ladder to wash the ceiling but it remained a muted barbecue brown and the house reeked of Kraft Hickory Sauce ever after.

Mom never let me in her kitchen again, not even to eat.

I still have nothing that will cook the asparagus. Maybe I’ll just wrap a slice of bread around it, dredge it in vinegar-and-salt potato chip crumbs and serve it with a nice Irish Cream sauce.

Bon appetit.