Still Learning to Use My Pressure Cooker

Since my last post, I've used the pressure cooker to make kidney beans, French dip sandwiches, banana French toast, unstuffed cabbage rolls, and chicken wings. Five recipes in twelve days isn't bad at all! And while I'm searching Pinterest to find out what I want to make, I'm finding things to do on the stove top or in the crock pot. (Yes, I know that the multi cooker also works as a slow cooker, but that afternoon it was easier to just stick with what I knew how to do.)

One lesson I'm learning from all of this is that I need to have a backup plan and be ready to try again. The beans were just on the edge of undercooked. If I'd brought the pot back up to pressure and cooked them just a little bit longer, dinner would have been better. Also, until I learn what I'm doing, I need to use it on nights that dinner can be a bit late. Hubby wound up eating a last minute sandwich while I added time to the chicken wings. He did get some before leaving for work that night, but I cut it way too close on that one.

Now that I've found it, I'm planning on following this step by step list from hip pressure cooking. I won't try all of the recipes, but at least I can read about the techniques and learn which buttons to push. I've got the "cook on high pressure" thing down, but there are other features to learn.

It really surprises me how angry many women in the online forums are at these machines. It's not the Instant Pot's fault that someone didn't like her spaghetti and had to order pizza. I'm wondering how bad the results had to be that it truly wasn't edible -- as awful at cooking as I sometimes am, we've almost never had a night that we couldn't/wouldn't eat dinner. There have been plenty of nights that dinner kind of sucked, but that's life.