Yeah, that was dorky, but if you can't find a way to make cooking fun, easy, and affordable then the time spent in the kitchen will be loads of not fun. Being an adult is serious enough as it is so if you don't do SOMETHING just to make yourself laugh otherwise you'll get those worry wrinkles sooner on your forehead. I'd much rather have laugh lines and crow's feet instead. Choose your wrinkles wisely! :D If you ask me about getting older, it's weird. I'm only 37 and I have enough gray hairs that I've been seriously thinking about starting to dye it again.
Yeah, yeah. All you 20 year olds out there think that 37 is near close to being dead, but quit tacking on 50 years to my age! My great-grandma Alice used to say that she was an 18 year old stuck in an 80 year old body. The older I get (against my will!) the more I find this to be very true. Age, much of the time IS just a state of mind.
And the fight against time. And hag chin hairs. You smart little whippersnappers think that's for old ladies, but they appear MUCH sooner than you ever wish for them to. You can't fight time but that doesn't mean you can't be as thrifty with it in the right areas as you can with a food budget. Thus enters in my newly
For many, many years I've been resisting buying expensive kitchen gadgets that would turn out to be worthless. I'm not saying some didn't sneak though (I'm looking at you fancy smancy juicer and your cheap shelfmate the air popcorn popper...) That doesn't mean I don't want more things to play with, I just try hard to have a very, very, very good reason to bring more things into our very small kitchen. Things like a stick blender would be fun to have, but I have no idea what I'd realistically do with one because I don't eat mashed potatoes enough to make it worthwhile.
I bought the Instant Pot hoping to make cooking beans faster without overcooking them like I was starting to regularly do when a short attention span would set in and I'd forget that after 4 ish hours of cooking that they needed to be checked and dealt with. I am not someone who innately loves beans. In fact growing up I thought they were really super gross. It wasn't until I forced myself to find a single recipe that I liked using beans that I'd eat willingly. Now we have two shelves in our kitchen dedicated to repurposed metal coffee cans that hold 4 pounds of dry beans each. White, Kidney, Mung, Pinto, Black, Black Eyed Peas, Adzuki, and Garbanzo beans are constantly being added to our meals at a high enough rate that I have to cook them ahead and keep a stock of them in the freezer as well!
The search also started after I'd been having some major shoulder pain for a couple of months and needed something to help me in the kitchen so I could attempt to cook. I kept saying to myself that I already have loads of electric helpers in the kitchen: 3 crockpots, Kitchenaid stand mixer, blender, Cuisinart food processor, bread machine, belgian waffle iron, pancake griddle, hot plate, electric skillet, FoodSaver, Soymilk maker, ice cream maker, and the aforementioned juicer & popcorn popper. Did I say we have a small kitchen? Yes we do. Most of these are in our dining room that we now call the 'kitchen extension' because it's twice the size of our kitchen at about 10 feet by 8 feet.
It takes quite a lot to get me to add anything else in because we are seriously running out of room! Most of the appliances are stored away when not in use just to save the space. To be honest, the final push once I was able to fit it within the budget was the yogurt option. Once when I was younger Mom made homemade yogurt during some heath food kick. You'd think that a kid would totally hate unsweetened yogurt with some sweetener added in, but I totally loved it! The tang was something I never forgot and I've wanted to make homemade yogurt ever since. However, every time I got a frantic notion to make it myself, the yogurt makers always seem so stupidly overpriced but the DIY option seemed like it would only turn to disaster with my scatterbrained ways. All I could think of is mouldy yogurt. What a way to ruin childhood memories.
Previously I've seen 'multi-cookers' as nothing but a sales gimmick, but this time I was buying it to use as a pressure cooker, and what it's mainly designed to be. From the few things we've tried with it so far... I'm impressed! I've done homemade chili, attempted brown rice, a few batches of beans (Bubbin mostly did black beans), steel-cut oatmeal, a one-pot pasta dish, and... yogurt! Here's what I think so far:
Chili - I hated chili for a long time because all I could think of was the Nally's vegetarian chili. If I could rename it, it would be called Stomach Acid Dog Food. So gross. Even the smell of it makes my stomach turn. So a few months back I decided to invent my own kind of chili since loads of bean are good for you and I could use the ones I actually like. Ended up with a recipe I like enough to want to eat it twice a week but it's annoying to have to babysit it on the stovetop while it sputters and makes a mess. So the first thing we tried in the pressure cooker was the chili. Still tastes the same but takes about a half hour less to cook without stirring and without the mess! Sounds like a winner to me!
Brown Rice - My personal opinion is I'm not thrilled. Does it cook it? Yes. So what's the problem? I've mentioned to Bubbin many times how I'm a rice snob (Japanese short grain sticky rice is my favorite) and I've had to take a very long time to like brown rice. We eat it now because it's better for Bubbin than white rice (me too but I'm not giving it up. I'd rather remove all of the wheat from my diet first.) But I hate, hate, hate the firm texture it has and how it never sticks together. If that's what you love about brown rice, the Instant Pot might just be a godsend. For me I'd rather take the extra time and cook it on the stovetop so the grains have a chance to expand and burst that outer skin to make it at least a step closer to white rice. Bubbin might love the cooker version of brown rice because of the mouthfeel as well as the shorter time. As for me it's a big gigantic no.
Just Beans - The jury is still out on this one... so far for my norma bulk bean cooking, it looks like I'll be sticking to my crockpots even if the cooker takes 1/4 the time it also can't do as large of a batch. First attempt was not quite cooked enough, second attempt of my own resulted in overcooked beans. Where it really shines is if we forgot to soak the beans and need to cook them from dry in a short amount of time.
Steel-Cut Oatmeal - I actually found a kind of oatmeal Bubbin will eat! He hates normal old-fashioned oatmeal because of the texture even if he doesn't mind the taste. I'm just thrilled that I can make oatmeal and he'll eat it. The recipe needs a bit of work to not be so watery but that's easy to fix. Part of me is beginning to long for sauteed onions and vegan black eyed pea 'sausage' patties on top of SC oatmeal. I don't think savory oatmeal has ever even occurred to the Bubbin...
One Pot Pasta - I used this YouTube recipe with a few changes (noted in the comments.) Straight out of the pot it was seriously good! I don't regret making it at all. As I said in my comment, I really want to make this part of our normal meal rotation. However there are a few things I'm very hesitant about. What you cannot see in the video is that this makes a HUGE amount of pasta. With a salad, Bubbin and I could get 2 dinners out of it and easily a lunch. It tasted really really great, but I'm seriously bothered by the ratio of pasta to vegetables. I felt totally guilty eating it because of that. I've been trying very hard to cut down on the amount of wheat I consume because it is not benefiting me health wise. As we ate I kept thinking how I wanted to replace 2/3 of the pasta with cooked Garbanzos and toss in a lot of other veggies like mushrooms and diced tomatoes. Heck, knowing me I might end up turning it into a tomato based veggie soup. XD It's good enough to make it SO worth trying to adapt it to how I prefer to eat.
Yogurt - It freaking makes yogurt! There are two ways to go about it, either in jars or directly in the stainless steel cooker pot (where you cook everything else.) I went with the jars following YouTube recipe and it went pretty well. My only complaint is with my OCD approach to cooking especially I found her lack of precise measurements to be frustrating. I completely understand that she's trying to make it as simple as possible to make using a pressure cooker less daunting or terrifying, and that the type of milk and yogurt culture can affect things drastically, but it was frustrating none the less. I have only made one batch so far with 2% milk and a plain (but still sweetened*) premade yogurt and it did well enough that Bubbin and I had it for breakfast for three mornings in a row with frozen berries and cereal on top and again for dinner one night when neither of us was hungry enough to make a whole meal. Bubbin is THRILLED to be able to eat yogurt again. Being diabetic meant that most commercial yogurt was completely off limits because of the sugar content. I'm eagerly waiting for an order from Amazon to make my first attempt at yogurt with homemade soymilk because my body does not tolerate dairy well and I'm trying to remove as much of it from my diet as I can. Consuming so much real dairy in such a short time really reminded me why we haven't bought cow's milk in at least five years. (Bubbin however is totally addicted to cheese and will put it on everything making my transition away from dairy exceedingly difficult.) We are so thrilled with this single feature that we plan on buying a second Instant Pot just for yogurt! (The other reasons are because making yogurt takes about 10 hours and we can't use toe cooker for anything else, and due to the fact that strong smells like the onions from the pasta are retained in the sealing gasket. I've heard that these transfer to delicately flavored things like yogurt. It would be fine if using like a sour cream replacement, but I doubt I'd enjoy onion pasta sauce blueberry yogurt with a hint of garbanzo beans.) Even now when I think of homemade yogurt, it recalls the fad(?) it was in the late 70s to mid 80s I think when it was another resurgence of getting back to natural living. Being born in '78 I remember seeing old magazines as a kid with the very dated 70s photos aimed at people in the suburbs who wanted to feel like they were living a rural life, and somehow things like homemade yogurt would magically do that. XD Either way, I am so pleased that I can relive that bit of goofy nostalgia every time I make yogurt in my canning jars. :D I'm looking forward to trying new flavors of yogurt too, like sugar free 'sweetened' adzuki beans or Garam Masala... (Mom has gone to India a couple of times and I joked to her about making Garam Masala muffins and she thought I was crazy. So I did it and they are really tasty. She was shocked!)
*I was totally stunned that I could not find plain unsweetened regular yogurt in a single serving size that was not greek yogurt. Of course they have the mondo big tubs of plain unsweetened, but that totally defeats the point of making it myself (and suckerpunches my budget as well.) I want to make my own in part because of being left with all those freaking containers! I can't stand the wastefulness. I even cringe at the small containers that I cannot reuse since they no longer come with usable lids. That was the final point when I quit buying yogurt regularly.
I may or may not name our new pressure cookers Bruno and Penelope... If so, they will require googly eyes. LOL!
I want to document my way through using an Instant Pot pressure cooker in hopes that someone out there might find it interesting or helpful. Pressure cookers are not new, but some of the way the IP does things are. There are loads of people out there trying to find info on how to specifically use this cooker without having to sort through a fog of confusing information that also applies to stovetop pressure cookers. How do I know? I am one such person.
So far I've seen two distinct camps of IP people as I've seen via the net. Either seasoned cooks who use or have used one or multiple kinds pressure cookers or complete noobs to pressure cooking that (as far as I've been able to decipher) don't have an extensive amount of cooking experience. As for me, I feel like I'm in the middle of the road. I've been cooking since Mom could get me into the kitchen without hurting myself. I was learning to decorate my own cakes and making white sauce for homemade macaroni and cheese by the time I was 9 or 10. It wasn't until a few years ago that I found out how to properly make a roux... LOL! So no learning is perfect. All those years all I had heard about pressure cookers was that they were dangerous and would explode. So a pressure cooker, any pressure cooker feels like a newfangled contraption to me. I know it isn't magic, but it can sure work some! :D
To make my endeavors even more frustrating is that Bubbin and I are vegetarians, and I aim to be an ovo-vegetarian instead of a lacto-ovo vegetarian and I strive to have as many of our meals be ovo-vegetarian as much as I can (In an ideal world I'd be vegan because I love the food, but that label comes with it so much assumed social obligation that my pacifist self can't deal with. I know because I tried for two years after discovering I'm severely allergic to honey. There are just so many 'rules' that the label requires pertaining to researching food to a paranoid level that I nearly had a breakdown in conjunction with my eating disorder.) Much of my family is becoming gluten free so I know some about that as well. My only personal complaint is that the replacements are often various starches which makes them a complete no-no as it pertains to carbs and Bubbin's diabetes. This blog is not specifically for pressure cooker recipes, but whatever I happen to be cooking in the kitchen and related things like budgeting.
I hope you enjoy the journey along with me.
