[Urbane Guerrilla]

Hmmp. Save up for waterless cookware. The aluminum-cored variety does what cast iron does only faster and on less fuel because aluminum has less mass and conducts heat faster.

I've spent at least forty-six of my forty-nine years hating carrots. It is incredible what cooking the orange Bugs Bunny root does when you cook it waterless. It actually keeps the carrot's natural sugars within the root where you can enjoy them -- cures the whole reason cooked carrots taste bad: those sugars leaching out into the water and getting poured down the drain along with the water-soluble vitamins.

Waterless cookware comes high. Cutco's waterless is the least expensive -- nothing wrong with it, it's just that we can market it as a sideline to our kitchen cutlery business and pare a lot of costs that way, so we can sell it for a lot less.

We used to demonstrate the cookware by boiling an egg -- without water. The eggs tended to explode and throw the pan lid at the ceiling no matter how low we turned the gas -- waterless cookware should only be cooking at low temperatures. What you spend on cookware you make back in the fuel you don't use, and the better quality of the meat dishes you cook this way. They retain more of their juices and more of their precooked weight, and the meat comes out nice and juicy. It's a great way to cook pork.

Nowadays, we can do a simple small cooking demo by cooking pineapple upside down cake on the stove top -- following the directions on one package of Jiffy mix, a can of pineapple rings, and some brown sugar, and oh yeah, a little butter to start by melting the sugar in before you plop the pineapple rings down. Your can will have one more slice than you have room for in that pan; eat it. The cake doesn't stay around for long after you invert it out of the pan. I've also assisted at demos of the entire set of cookware that created a supper, which we then sat down and ate, to considerable lip-smacking and nummy-sounds. One thing we tell our clients about the cookware is if you turned off the heat under the pan and then you can't get the lid off it (the lid seals down onto the pan to cook the food best, and the lids have the same conductive core as the pan bodies do), just heat the pan on medium for five or ten seconds and it'll come off. We've been called up by hungry desperate people before on their first big meal.

It's a very different way of cooking. You can stack waterless pans atop each other on one single burner and cook everything in the stack. You have to educate yourself not to use so high a heat as you used to. People ask us if the cookware's nonstick. We tell them food sticks because of hot spots in the pan; when the heat's completely even within a few degrees you don't get sticking problems. No Teflon, no teflon troubles.