“Pressure Cooking So Easy, a Child Can Do It!”

“What’s for dinner, Mom?” says the daughter unit.

“I was planning on making that mall court chicken in the Instant Pot,” say I.

“Well, can I make it for us?”

**falls down in a dead faint, a blissful smile of awe on my lips…**

Yes folks, this was an actual conversation held with my now 14-year-old just a few weeks ago, after she evidently underwent alien abduction, a lobotomy or an exorcism; whatever it was, it resulted in a formerly sullen and irritable teenager to blossom overnight into…exactly the wonderful and sweet-natured girl she had previously been before hormones took over with a vengeance. If it doesn’t last, at least now I will have documented proof that it happened!

But moving on to the food! My daughter has long been in the kitchen alongside me, learning to cook and bake at an early age so I would never have to worry about her leaving home and not being able to feed herself if it didn’t come from a can or defrost in the microwave. To be fair she eats a lot of that stuff right now, but that harks back to the teen thing. At least she has the skill set for options! So when she said she wanted to prepare this IP dinner for her step-father and me, I was more than happy to let her learn to use this new tool. It could very well be a trusted appliance on her first countertop as well! I’ll agree that the title of this recipe, Mall Food Court Bourbon Chicken, sounds a little inelegant, but hey, not every meal has to be gourmet! I absolutely adore bourbon chicken, so I was excited to see how this version stacked up to mall food court standards. Face it, mall food courts exist because we love the cheap, mass produced snacks they offer! Come to find out it wasn’t as simple making this at home as one might think, assuming one of the factors to consider for simplicity is how many things go into it. The bourbon sauce consisted of ten separate ingredients PLUS bourbon (which naturally gets to be mentioned all by itself.) I had no idea! The only store-bought items were hoisin sauce and ketchup, while the rest was made up of soy sauce, honey, garlic, fresh ginger, rice vinegar, brown sugar, cornstarch and chicken broth. Can’t you just smell it?? We sure could, as we lounged about on the sofa and let the child do the “hard labor”. The beautiful thing about the IP is that all I had to do was explain a couple button functions, demonstrate how to lock the top on and orient the vent so pressure would build, and define what Quick Release and Natural Release meant. After that, she was off to the races and had no trouble following the recipe whatsoever; dinner was divine, and I couldn’t have done any better myself! She now feels comfortable using a pressure cooker, which to be honest I would not have let her near when it meant using my old manual one! I consider that a major win, since she can now whip up a quick dinner for herself (and her lucky parents!), and I will forever treasure the sautéed chicken oil spatters on page 138 of my cookbook as a reminder of this historic event. Rating: 12/10, for showing me my beautiful baby girl is still alive and kicking in that emo-goth teenager shell! Plus it tasted great!

Sometimes fate has a way of popping into your life at he most opportune times. One such example of this was last week (i.e. the first week of January), when I had just declared the start of a dubious tradition in our household: “No Shopping Month”. Now don’t be fooled, if we need toilet paper, we aren’t resorting to Kleenex in an attempt to circumvent a trip to the store, but from the 1st to the 31st every new year, I try to a) clean out and toss any food items that have expired or were left open to go stale, and b) use up the remaining pantry and freezer staples that so often go overlooked (I’m looking at you, barley; more on this later!) To be honest, 2022 might be the first year where I try to go TWO full months without a trip to the grocery store; we are that stocked up! One thing we did not have an abundance of was pasta sauce. Spaghetti is a popular go-to meal when Mom isn’t home to make supper, and the Hubster doesn’t feel like heading to a drive-thru. He’s reasonably comfortable making pasta (always in a pot that’s too small, but he DOES always remember to salt the water!) and opening a jar of marinara. I could predict the panic that might set in if we had only a jar or two on the pantry shelf while looking down the barrel of potentially 60 days of a shopping ban, so when my book flopped open to Garlic Marinara Sauce all by itself, a recipe I hadn’t even noticed in the index, I knew it was fate making herself known. This sauce demanded to be made immediately!

I get unreasonably pleased whenever I have every single called-for ingredient on-hand without having to make substitutions. It makes me feel like I had a pop quiz dropped on me and found out I was totally prepared! My excitement ratchets up another level when I get to use up the last of any given container! Since the point of No Shopping Month (aside from the literal fortune I save in grocery bills), is using up the bits and bobs crowding my cabinets and shelves, I was stoked that I polished off a bottle of seasoned salt, the tail-end of a bottle of red wine, and a tube of tomato paste I had completely forgotten about in the refrigerator door. I just so happened to have a major overstock of garlic bulbs, and this recipe required 30 cloves. By the way, I still have a surplus of garlic, even after the sauce! After sautéing a beautiful and aromatic pile of sliced garlic and diced onion in olive oil, I tossed in garlic broth, canned tomatoes (used up several cans of those as well!) and the rest of the seasonings, letting it pressure cook together for 10 minutes. You read that correctly. Ten. Minutes. I know right now there are Italian nonnas rolling over in their graves about the “gravy” not simmering on the stove all day, but I’m German and I have no grandkids, so I’m happy to have it done in less time than I can watch a Netflix program!

Now, Jeff (the author) made some style choices that I do not necessarily agree with, because he evidently likes a more “garden chunky” sauce than we like. I didn’t publish the cookbook photo for precisely that reason; in his sauce you can clearly see garlic slivers, torn basil leaves and hunks of tomato. That doesn’t fly in this house, so mine got hit with the immersion blender, as well as slightly more tomato paste than he called for. The result was four 32 oz jars of flavorful, thick marinara that we paired with some homemade meatballs that week, and the rest are in the freezer, ready to bail us out when the Prego runs out! Rating: 9/10; mine was actually a 10, but I doctored the product with extra fresh herbs, which made it perfect! I’m noting that as written, the author tends to under-season, IMHO.

Finally we come a recipe I have been looking forward to since for ages: Beef & Barley Soup. The temps in Northern Colorado have been hovering in the teens for most of January, after delivering a particularly dry and brown Christmas followed by a New Year’s Eve snow dump (Thanks, Marie Callender’s…) There is nothing better to eat when the outdoors are frigid than rich and hearty stew or soup, and this one qualifies as both! Let me explain. You know how if you undercook rice it will retain a crunchy core that resists any attempts to rehydrate later? You could leave that rice in a bowl of water for a week and it’s never going to get softer than it already is. Barley is a somewhat unique grain in that it continues to be as absorbent as that Quicker-Picker-Upper brand would have you believe their paper towels are. The photo below shows how the soup looked directly after cooking; by the next day there was a 50% reduction in liquid and plumper grains of barley. By day three, no liquid remained at all and it closely resembled risotto. That is not to say unappetizing! Rather the dish becomes even more filling, and my husband continued to chow on the leftovers for several days, simply adding some broth to get back some soup-like texture. This was a fantastic opportunity to use up the second half of the barley I bought…wait for it… FIVE years ago. Yep, that’s another fun fact about this amazing grain; if it’s kept in an airtight container, it can last almost longer than you want it to! I have never figured out another use for barley, so soup is about it. You may have noticed, there are a fair number of soup recipes in the world, and I want to make almost all of them! I rarely get the opportunity to repeat one, so I was thrilled to see the IP version of a recipe I loved from Alton Brown’s Good Eats: Volume 1. When I popped the lid of the barley container, there was not a whiff of mustiness or any indication that it had gone stale, and I was not disappointed. Enough waxing poetic about grain; the rest of the meal was rounded out with the titular beef (stew meat in my case, cut into bite sized pieces), carrots, celery, onion, and garlic. I was able to clean out an entire vegetable drawer plus use up the last of a box of chicken broth in addition to the beef broth the recipe calls for. If your educated palate can discern between broths when you are eating this, then go ahead and keep it pure; I was just glad of the extra space in my fridge! B&B soup gets a big 9.5/10, the only think keeping it from perfection is my desire to get just a touch more seasoning into the final product next time. Which that means I’ll probably end up with a half-bag of barley in my pantry that I carry into 2035…