A Prayer for 2025 via Steamed Veggies
Steaming veggies yield some thoughts on categories merging.
With the new year comes new ways to… cook vegetables.
Emily and I bought some bao from the store recently. The instructions told us we could microwave them or we could steam them. Seeing as the microwave instructions wanted you to keep the bao buddies in their plastic container, we went the steaming route. We figured we had plenty of microplastics swimming in the streams of our blood already.
I am not one to steam often. Heck, I may not have steamed the entirety of 2024! But I dug deep into the depths of the spinning shelf in the corner of our cabinets, and I got out the steaming basket and the pot. After filling the water level just right, I dropped the bao into the basket, and waited. Then, when all was softened up and ready, we ate the bao.
But here’s where the story gets good!
In no more than 24 hours, the basket was featured in the dinner prep yet again. This sidelined kitchen device was having its moment in the sun! Like a minor leaguer scoring in their first game up with the majors, we couldn’t take this guy outta the line up just yet.
This time the basket, and its collaborator, the pot, were used to cook vegetables. Its unique cooking style taking the earth hardened skin of the vitamin and fiber filled friends and softening them up. Easier to digest, ChatGPT tells me, different flavor profile, new ways of extracting nutrients this way.
2025 is off and running as the year of the steamed veggie.
Now you might think I’m reaching here, searching for anything to write on to get a post out. Steamed veggies are no Doe Flow Credo type revelation. But one thing I used to do often that I find I am not doing as much is give myself space to noodle around and wonder about common curiosities. And seriously… what’s not more curiosity inducing than the wonder of what’s going on between pot, steam basket, water, and the food within?!
Here I am, fresh off a lunch of non-steamed food, and I’m imagining veggies sitting just above the boiling water in that basket. In my imagined flight of fancy, heat envelops a broccoli floret’s exterior and is infiltrating its rigid structure, loosening what the earth bound together in creative collaboration between snug soil and stark sunlight. The steam is loosening the broccoli, water and solid are finding intersection to create wilt and mush.
It’s some sort of magic, really!
The rain has been falling outside all day. Same story yesterday. January mud has overtaken my dead-end dirt road. Liquid and solid have blurred the lines.
When I finish the steam cycle, I take the basket out of the pot and notice how the water holds a dyed tone in the color of vegetable that was being steamed. The vegetable holds obvious moisture from the water. Categories and boundaries have blurred.
In the same way, outside in the endless rain — the rain is now a bit road, the road a bit rain.
I walk down the road, I take a bite… what now am I?
This makes me think of how we speak of boundary. When does a broccoli stalk become water? When does the water steaming the stalk become broccoli? In this type of equation, we probably say that they both are, but are also both.
Water is vegetable is me. Can the blurring hold the both and make way for the combined?
A prayer for the year.
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