Last year my good friend and I were on our morning walk and she told me about this new cooking gadget that had changed her life, called the Instant Pot. She told me all about the time that this pressure cooker was saving her on meals and how it was simplifying her life. It could make hardboiled eggs in 5 minutes, whole chickens in 25, a roast in an hour. The Instant Pot could do any recipe that I normally cook, but in half the time. Being a busy mom, this sounded like a gadget that I needed to have in my life. So, when it went on sale on Black Friday, I bought one!
The first thing I made was a whole chicken with root veggies, and I will say that I was very impressed with how quickly it cooked and how the meat just fell right off the bones. I wanted to adapt my usual recipes to use in the Instant Pot, but I admit that I didn’t quite find the time to figure it out. With all the different buttons on the pot and trying to figure out how long to cook on which setting, I let myself get overwhelmed and it was quicker and easier to cook from my usual go-to recipes. The Instant Pot was put in the cupboard in the garage and only brought out on occasion; when I needed a chicken cooked fast.
This year, my husband bought me a book for Christmas; it was a cookbook with all the best Instant Pot recipes from bloggers. Think he was trying to give me a hint? I decided it was time to acquaint myself with the Instant Pot and learn once and for all how to use it! With today’s technology it’s easy enough to go onto Pinterest and pin recipes that look good. But to be honest, it’s so much easier to thumb through a book and pick out recipes that I want to try rather than getting sucked into my phone on Pinterest for hours (and then having to print all the recipes out because I work much better with a hard copy in front of me rather than a screen that keeps going to sleep while I’m trying to read and cook!)
Let me just tell you that this book has been amazing so far! Last week, I made my menu using recipes from this book for every night of the week. We haven’t made a recipe yet that we haven’t liked!! They really are the best recipes out on the web, all compiled in once place! Each recipe tells you exactly which buttons to push on the pot and how long it will take to make it; it really can’t get any easier than that! I can’t believe it has taken me this long to finally learn how to use the Instant Pot, but now that I have, I am hooked. I plan to include Instant Pot meals onto my menu at least 2-3 times a week, maybe more while I am still trying out all of the recipes.
The book includes sections for all categories of cooking: breakfast, poultry, beef, fish, soups, desserts, vegetables, appetizers and just the basic know-how for using the pot (and base recipes like broths, oatmeal, etc). There are lots of recipes to choose from!
Here are some of the recipes we tried last week. We loved each one!
If you haven’t gotten an Instant Pot yet, it’s a must!! I’m telling you, it really does simplify and make cooking easier. I prefer it over a crockpot because I feel like the flavor and textures of the food are much better. I don’t care for the texture of chicken when I cook it in a crockpot, so I tend to stay away from crockpot recipes using chicken. But with theInstant Pot, the texture is the same as when you cook in an oven. The same goes with pastas; I just feel like everything is better in the Instant Pot! And bonus: you can still do slow-cooking in the crockpot, so if you need to put something in the Instant Pot earlier in the day to be ready after work, there are recipes for that as well!
If you’re like me and you don’t know where to get started with the Instant Pot, save yourself the time and headache and buy this cookbook! You won’t regret it!!
You can get both the Instant Pot and the Instant Pot cookbook here!
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