The Instant Pot won't fit in my pantry, but I found another spot for it, and a name. I am going to call him Colossus of Roasts (Col for short, I think -- a little nod to Prydain), and tonight was his first outing.
First I pressure-cooked the CSA beets in the steamer while I prepped onion and carrots. The bigger beets needed a few additional minutes, but it was quick and easy to get them cooked through. Disclosure: I have been using a pressure cooker for years, so I have already done the mental work of thinking BUT IT MIGHT EXPLODE PERHAPS ANOTHER DAY WOULD BE BETTER. I tipped the beets into a bowl to cool, rinsed out the inner thingummy, and put it in sauté mode with the heat on max. I like my base veggies good and browned, which is the #1 disadvantage to my slow cooker: either you brown separately and have to deal with tipping all your hot food + fat into the narrower mouth of the slow cooker, or you don't brown things in advance and it winds up tasting like undifferentiated slow cooker stew. (Or at least that's my experience. Maybe I would have better luck if I didn't eschew seasoning packets?)
Browning my onions and carrots in the Instant Pot worked swimmingly, leaving me enough time to peel and chop and dress my beets, and when the veggies were done to my liking I added two turkey legs. (Why do we have turkey legs in July, you might ask? Because I married into a family that cannot resist a bargain. My SIL picked up some astounding quantity of frozen meat on sale, and my MIL implored me to take a turkey off her hands the last time I was at her house. Elwood roasted it earlier this month.) I put the IP in soup mode with a freezer bag full of stock, and 30 minutes later the meat was falling from the bone. I fork-shredded it and scooped some out for me, and then I stirred in leftover pasta for everybody else and put the IP in "keep warm" mode.
We ate our beet salad first-- 4 chopped beets, juice of half a lemon, goat cheese and olive oil to taste along with salt and pepper, scooped into the hollow of a quartered avocado. (It didn't stay put. More like "sprawled across a quartered avocado.") Our turkey soup was an unusually frugal dish but it was also very pleasant. Col made it significantly faster than it would have been without pressure-cooking, and more streamlined than it would have been with my old pressure cooker. And cleanup, as promised, was easy-peasy.
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