I’ve purchased a 5 quart pressure cooker, mainly because I’m cooking brown rice and chicken for my sick dog. My sister has a couple pressure cookers and uses them regularly.
Does anyone have any easy recipes, suitable for one person who doesn’t mind eating the same thing several days in a row?
StG
I love my pressure cooker, especially in the winter when I can make stews, pot roast and other cold weather dishes. Pot roast is really easy.
Get a boneless chuck roast.
Put a little oil in the bottom of the pressure cooker and brown the roast on all sides.
Remove from cooker and drain off most (or all) or the oil.
Chop up carrots, celery and onions. The amounts are variable. I use a couple of carrots and celery stalks and a whole onion.
Put those in the cooker with some salt, pepper and bay leaf.
Add a cup of beef or chicken broth (or water).
Put the roast on top.
Seal the lid, bring it up to pressure, keep at high pressure for about 40 minutes.
Voila.
Thanks, wonder9. Not many other pressure cookers out there, I guess.
StG
I received a pessure cooker as a gift a little while back and am still learning good things to make with it. I’m very fond of Alton Brown’s chili recipe from I’m Just Here For the Food. I’ve also cooked chicken* in order to get it to shred for something like chicken salad, and it does an amazing job at that.
In both cases I’ve found that using the hubcap-looking rack insert keeps things from sticking to the bottom of the pot and making an unholy ten-minutes-of-steel-wool-scrubbing mess.
( * chicken, one cup of water, 25 minutes )
I like using a pressure cooker for dried beans. The higher temps cook the beans faster, esp. if you’re using older store-bought beans (some of those suckers can be *years *old - still tasty but they take forever to cook) or if you’re just impatient about the cooking times involved with dried beans. Add a bay leaf to the pot.
Your cooker should have come with some sort of basic instruction manual that will tell you how high to fill it. I think it’s maybe “not more than halfway” or something. Beans foam up quite a bit in cooking, so heed whatever instructions came with it.
As a variant on the above pot roast recipe from Wonder9, you can use smaller pieces of meat (like 1" or 2" cubes) and a bit more water/broth to make beef stew, or beef-and-vegetable soup if you use even a bit more water/broth than that…
Brown the meat first, as above, in batches if necessary to promote browning instead of steaming.
Also, my favorite trick for the sauce (in pot roast) or the broth (in beef-veg soup) is to sprinkle a small amount of gelatin once it’s almost done cooking or reducing. Unflavored gelatin, of course! Maybe a teaspoon or less. It adds a nice, rich viscosity to the broth or sauce. Got that trick out of Cook’s Illustrated, and it’s a good one. Mimics the effect of long, slow cooking with a big bone.
More than anything else, we use it for fresh green beans with little red potatoes. In your pressure cooker book, you’ll note that the water and time are different for potatoes and beans. Use the larger amount of water and the longer time between the two. Quarter a half onion and add salt and pepper.
That is some mighty fine eating! I believe it’s the finest meal you can make for very little money.
purplehorseshoe - I tried feeding my sick dog chicken and lentils, but she didn’t like the lentils.
StG
Smart dog. I’ve never figured out why anyone liked lentils anyway…2 legged or 4 legged.
:eek::eek::eek: Lentils have legs??? :eek::eek::eek:
I like lentils… though if they had legs I might have to change that opinion. Diet for a Small Planet has a great lentil soup recipe - “Monastery Lentils”
/hijack
Oh, and more to the point, Epicurious.com has a number of interesting looking recipes that call for a pressure cooker. Just go there and type “pressure cooker” into the search bar.
I like to buy jars of assorted flavors of cooking sauces. Both the Asian and Hispanic sections of the market have some good ones. Then I saute some onions or garlic in the cooker, pull the skin off of several chicken thighs, and put them in the cooker with a jar of the sauce and a few peeled whole carrots and cook on high pressure for 20-30 minutes. It makes a terrific quick chicken stew.
I once saw Jacques Pepin do a veal roast in one, but he added no liquid. He sauteed a few chunked-up vegies down in the bottom, then placed the roast on top and pressure-cooked it until it was “roasted” and medium-rare in the middle. I’ve always wanted to try it, but the instructions said you must add at least 1/2 cup of liquid to the cooker. Anybody ever tried this?