Conducted successful experiments two and three using my pressure cooker. First, I made vegetable stock. Trader Joe's carries good ready-made stock, but Trader Joe's is a bit of a drive from where I live, and the stock still has a lot of sodium in it. At regular grocery stores, vegetable stock is made with high fructose corn syrup, not to mention up to 900 mg of sodium! Then for dinner tonight I made lentil soup using the stock I'd made. It tasted very good. I used a new recipe from The Bean Harvest Cookbook by Ashley Miller, a cookbook I found at the used cookbook store just down the street.

From another cookbok I found at the library, Eating Well in a Busy World by Francine Allen: "One of the simplest ways I have found to refresh myself from the numbness caused by long hours of shuffling ideas and papers is to immerse myself in the textures, colors and smells of things of the earth....[R]insing, chopping and cooking fresh foods not only leads to healthful meals, but can sensually delight and mentally relax the tired cook" (p. xi). And from Rosemary Radford Ruether: "[N]o theologian can be taken seriously unless he or she can cook" (quoted by John Goldingay and E. Schillebeeckx).