My parents recommended getting an Instant Pot during the holidays. Apparently, the thing is all the rage and my parents had had an asian branded version for years and just kept it in storage. One my mom's friends said they should break it out and try it and since then, my parents have never put it away.
So I got my own. I love that you can do so much with it. It's mainly a pressure cooker, but you can saute in it and use it as a slow cooker. I have only started to use it for a couple of months and still not regularly, but even with my limited experience, I am very please with it. Here are a list of things I've done with it:
Hard boiled eggs. I will never cook hard boiled eggs in any other way again! The shells are SO easy to peel off!
Spaghetti squash. I stick the squash in whole with some water and set it to 30 minutes and make the sauce in the meantime. After that, just cut the softened squash open, scoop out the strands and mix with the sauce. Easy peasy!
Braised beef. Get some nice, fatty beef and saute it in some sugar until caramelized. Then add some sauces and cook until tender, for us it was about an hour. I used ingredients to make a red-cooked beef: http://redcook.net/2008/04/28/red-cooked-beef/
I also used the braised beef to make beef noodle soup. Just add noodles in and cook for about half the recommended noodle cooking time.
I've also cooked steamed veggies in it. We were having Jamie Oliver's milk chicken and I dumped a couple of packets of steaming veggies with sauce into the Instant Pot and within a few minutes of cooking time, they were ready!
The last thing I made were salmon and asparagus packets. Basically salmon over asparagus drizzled with a tiny bit of olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper and wrapped in foil. I cooked the packets for 15 minutes and everything came out fairly perfectly!
Going forward, I am itching to try out some pasta recipes and the yogurt function. It supposedly can also make jiu niang, which is this fermented glutinous rice dish that is wonderful in the winter with a poached egg.
Yay for my Instant Pot!
