Unlike at my last company, where I currently work, I am lucky and privileged to say that I have a number of colleagues that I not only respect but also truly like as people. We have really interesting conversations about everything from politics to cooking techniques to travel, and I feel like for the most part, the majority of the people I work with are actually good people. I could not honestly say that about my last job.

What this tends to result in is my subconsciously thinking about my colleagues, which tends to be a little strange and a little funny. My dreams have always been a big part of my life, even in the waking state, because I tend to think about them a lot. This morning, I woke up from a dream that one of my colleagues (who I’ve been avidly discussing the Instant Pot with since he received it as a wedding present recently) and I were running from the Gestapo through an underground tunnel system. We were running and dodging pipes when suddenly, he stops me and reminds me that the only thing we have to eat is a box of edamame-based pasta, and how were we going to cook it since we had no equipment, no water, and were still on the run? I wasn’t sure how to respond to it since we were in flight and fear mode, so I just grabbed the box and kept running and encouraging him to run with me. I texted him and told him about the dream after, and he laughed and said that the Instant Pot would have saved us in that event.

This segways into my first Instant Pot experience today, which was a total failure. I tried to make vegetable biryani in the Instant Pot as my first experiment, and it ended up burning the bottom of the pot and also overcooking the biryani into a disgusting brown mush. In retrospect, I should have stuck with a simpler beginner’s recipe to get used to the IP, but I figured that since the water steam test worked just fine that… well, how hard could it be to pressure cook some spiced rice?! Now, I’m thinking about pressure cooking a bean curry for tomorrow to see if I can get the hang of this new pot or not. I’m so sad that I’ve now become a statistic for the dreaded “burn” signal that the IP can give, as it’s one of the most common issues that new Instant Pot owners face.