I recently received an Instant Pot from someone who was gifted one but wasn’t interested. When offered, I did not jump at the chance. I already had a slow cooker and stove top pressure cooker. I work from home and feed my kids a dinner type meal around 3:30-4pm before leaving the house for evening activities. We aren’t a family who all comes in from our days at 5pm looking to sit down and eat at 6pm, which seemed like the target audiences for the Instant Pot recipes I’ve seen.
But when re-offered, I thought “sure, why not.” You know I’m always up for an experiment. The first thing I did after receiving the multi cooker was donate my old slow cooker. I had tried to make dashi stock over a year ago and it spilled into the cooking portion of the cooker and not matter how many times I tried to clean it, I could smell it every time I walked by the shelf the crock pot lived on in the basement. I was afraid to ask if someone else smelled it or not, but either way, I was happy to see it go.
The next Instant Pot related activity I did was buy a whole chicken to allegedly cook in 45 minutes. But I chickened out (bad pun) and roasted it in the oven, not wanting to risk messing it up or have it come out “weird” because we had a busy night that night and I wanted to make sure the kids actually filled their stomachs before heading out.
My husband often makes a bean chili for himself to eat for lunch for a week using dry beans that seem to take all day to cook, so I was trying to pressure (another pun) him into using the Instant Pot to cook the beans. But he wasn’t that inspired and now he hasn’t made his chili.
On Sunday afternoon, my daughter and I bought a couple rotisserie chickens. I’ve been making stock in the crock pot overnight a lot after cleaning off the chicken carcasses. It never turns out to be the alleged gut healing gelatinous bone broth I intend even if I leave it for 18+ hours of cooking, but makes a fine stock to freeze or use for soup. Monday is our trash and the truck usually comes early Monday mornings so I wanted to get the chicken bones into the trash Sunday night. In comes the Instant Pot. I figured I could make the stock quickly with nothing to to lose and get the bones in the trash.
It totally worked! Quick and easy, as advertised. I dumped in two birds’ bones, a small onion, a couple carrots and celery stalks, a few cloves of garlic, a couple bay leaves and water. I have pressure cooker experience from canning, so the spurting steam didn’t bother or surprise me at all, but I guess I could see someone being alarmed by that. And the end product under two hours after starting was perfect bone broth. It was easy, quick and delicious. And the bones didn’t have to stink in my trash all week. I’m definitely doing that again.
What Instant Pot recipes to you recommend?
