My New Best Friend

Anyone who has experienced "Lyme Brain," the common name for cognitive disorders caused by Lyme disease, will understand how even simple tasks sometimes become difficult to handle. You walk into a room to do something and forget what you were doing. You run around the house looking for your glasses when they're already on your face. Get sidetracked and never get back to the original task. While many healthy people will joke that they do these things all the time too, for those with Lyme Brain, it's more serious and can easily limit your daily activities. You end up lost while driving, assuming you trust yourself enough to drive in the first place. You leave a lit candle unattended, or a space heater on when leaving the house.

One of the biggest challenges for me has been cooking. I wasn't a great cook before Lyme took over my life, and the Lyme Brain has made it a near-impossible task. Water boils over and leaves a mess on the stove top. I forget to turn on the crock pot, or better yet, turn it on but never plug it in. I forget ingredients or read the measurements wrong. Forget to put a lid on the spaghetti sauce. Leave something in the oven until I smell it burning. I've ruined frying pans with burned-on food. It's somewhat of a running joke in my house, although even my kids know not to trust me in the kitchen.

In my quest to make my life better, I've at least found one thing that helps: my new Instant Pot. It's a pressure cooker that also functions as a crock pot, and it's helped my family out in quite a few ways in the few short weeks we've had it.

For starters, since my husband does the majority of the cooking after working all day, the Instant Pot is great for throwing a meal together in less time than it would normally take to cook. Instead of having convenience foods because we're short on time, we can have a full meal.

But not only that, it's something even I can work with. Assuming I get the ingredients correct, since it's digital you can't set it without first plugging it in. Makes it more difficult for me to forget! You can cook chicken and ground beef from frozen, so when I forget to take them out of the freezer the night before we can still have a decent dinner without much fuss.

You can also convert existing slow cooker recipes to the Instant Pot, and it'll taste like it's been cooking all day long in a fraction of the time.

As ridiculous as it sounds, my favorite thing to make in the Instant Pot so far is hard boiled eggs. Why not just boil them on the stove top? Well, there's my bad habit of boiling things over or forgetting about them. Besides, I never got the timing right on eggs, and they'd end up with that grayish-green color to the yolks. And plenty of times I would end up with cracked eggs leaking out during boiling. With my beloved Instant Pot, I set it and forget it. Not only is it super simple, but the eggs practically peel themselves. No more picking tiny pieces of shell off or peeling off half the egg white in the process. When my kids want egg salad for lunch, they're mixing in the mayo about 15 minutes after starting the pot.

I'm looking forward to all the new recipes we'll be trying in our Instant Pot. If you have a favorite, please share it in the comments. Maybe I'll post a few of my own on the blog.