Welcome to The Breadwinner, in which Manny Howard--a lifelong Brooklynite following his wife's high-powered job to Los Angeles--attempts to feed his family, whether they like it or not.

(Credit: Manny Howard)

There was a loud click and a ferocious hiss, and Bevan Jake looked up from the kitchen table, where he'd been studying a book called The Red Planet. "What is THAT, Daddy?" he asked.

"It's a pressure cooker, Hon."

Now, before we travel any farther down this road, let me state this: I sympathize with those who say it's "too soon" for a pressure-cooker column. The Boston bombings were vicious, and turned this everyday household device into a symbol of terror. But I don't want the pressure cooker to become yet another victim--it's too useful, too beautiful, too much a part of my own food history for me to forsake it.

My father introduced me to the complex charms of the pressure cooker when I was a child. Dad was a chemist by training, but a fabulist by inclination. Never one to overlook an opportunity for instruction, his zeal for best practices and devotion to the tall tale intersected at the pressure cooker. The power it harnesses requires care and planning. He chose to illustrate this using harrowing tales of food preparation gone horribly wrong: of cavalier cooks and grotesque disfiguring burns, stupefying concussions besetting misinformed practitioners, and all this torment for pots of green pea, oxtail, and lentil soup. So while I have him to thank for the knowledge that psi measures not pounds per square inch but rather pound-force per square inch, the hiss of the pot elicits strong emotions.

Still, Dad was so convinced of the destructive powers of the pressure cooker that he once set out to pulverize the unimaginably tough carcass of a Christmas goose. Success came at quite a cost. The goose was unrelenting, dad lost track of the project during its course, the water evacuated his false atmosphere, and the goose bonded on a molecular level with the cooker. The resulting hybrid left for the landfill with very little fanfare.

Dad and I often joked about the goose, but the pressure cooker was a noticeable absence in my larder. I did not own one, until, prompted by Boston and my own silly fears that the device might get banned, I ordered the T-fal stainless steel pressure cooker from the world's largest online retailer. When it arrived on the doorstep in sunny California, I set out at once to repeat the sins of the father.