Give In to Peer Pressure: Get Yourself an Instant Pot!

I’m pretty sure I have made this reference before, but in case you missed that blog, here it is again: do you remember the 80’s television ad for Rice Krispies treats, where the mom reads a romance novel behind the closed kitchen door all day after knocking out the recipe in a matter of minutes, only to frizz up her hair and throw flour in her face before “exhaustedly” coming out to present the treats to her grateful family? Yeah; it’s like that. Do you remember that kitchens used to have doors?? It’s hard to get away with such shenanigans in today’s open concept, eat-in kitchens, but the delight remains the same: creating dinner at the touch of a button is a miracle for working parents everywhere!

I took the idea of meal prep simplification one step further by cheating my face off for the preparation of #10 Crabby Creamed Corn. Not just a short-cut appliance, but a whole short-cut side dish! You may notice from the picture that this meal appears to be a step above your average Tuesday night reheat, and that’s because I made this recipe utilizing my Christmas dinner leftovers. Prime rib, mashed potatoes and Ree Drummond’s creamed corn graced our holiday table, and it was phenomenal at the time. It was also especially convenient to already have creamed corn made, so I literally just had to dump in a half-pound of lump crab meat to “make” the IP recipe. Hey, it still counts! For the sake of argument and to have something to say about it besides “it was good”, I’ll give you a compare and contrast. Ree’s corn calls for almost nothing aside from corn, yet it is creamy, rich and tastes like heaven. The only other ingredients are heavy cream and butter, pepper and salt to taste, simmered on the stovetop for 20 minutes; somehow this alchemy gives the impression of a cheesy flavor. It is entirely hallucinated! The IP corn however, DOES call for cheese, and a lot of of it. The dish was already quite thick, so I worried about making it clumpy; half a package of cream cheese and half cup of Parmesan was on the border of excessive. If my corn had been “pristine”, perhaps that would have been a reasonable amount. I skipped adding more butter, but I threw in the bit of sugar that it called for, though I couldn’t figure why it was necessary. Crab=sweet, corn=sweet, so I scratched my head on that one. Anyway, I mention that my corn was already thick for a reason; there was a real danger of getting something called a “Burn Notice” when there isn’t enough liquid in the IP to form steam. This was news to me; I love a cookbook that teaches me stuff, not just recipes! Apparently while cooking in the IP, the fluid shouldn’t be much thicker than soup broth or you risk burning food to the bottom, which means I was breaking the cardinal rule: “Don’t pressure luck”… There it is, the Dad joke you were waiting for! (Credit to the author for that pun, btw!)

When I was married four months ago, there was one thing I was really looking forward to. Ok, maybe the list was slightly longer of things I was looking forward to, but definitely in the Top 5 was my dinner. We had sampled the menu several months in advance, and hands-down our favorite option was #11 Chicken Marsala. Of course, the caterer’s chicken Marsala was not made in the Instant Pot (as far as I know!) but the meat was tender and juicy, the sauce was hearty and had a rich flavor, and the mushrooms were perfection. I daydreamed about that meal more than I should, with its fluffy bed of mashed potatoes beneath the chicken, and I sang its praises to everyone trying to decide which meal to choose. Such was my anticipation that I avoided other chicken Marsalas, saving myself, as it were, for the full-sized portion I was going to enjoy at my reception! Imagine my disappointment when the waiter, with great flourish, presented the plate to me at the head table…a plate of fried chicken cutlet. Not. Even. Close. No mushrooms, wrong sauce. I have no idea what the “new chef” was thinking Chicken Marsala was but my friends, that was not it. The beef brisket dish was wrong too, by the way. Nothing was inedible, but it was so NOT what we ordered! Which goes to show, you better be happy with WHO you are marrying, because “perfect” weddings do not exist and something is bound to go wrong! All of this brings me to the point of this tale: I never got the Chicken Marsala I was promised and I’m still craving it! I am sad to report that this version is also not my ideal; Ree did it better. I had a couple of issues with this recipe, and I am starting to notice a trend in this book. One is that my buddy Jeff errs on the side of caution when it comes to seasoning, so I have found more than one occasion where the idea was solid, but the execution was lacking when it comes to flavor. The same spices but MORE of just about everything would probably be good. Second, he’s never met a tub of corn starch he doesn’t like. I get it, too-thin sauces and soups and stews are kind of a letdown, but he takes it a bit far in my opinion. The Dijon pork ended up suspended in what appeared to be a “mustard jello” when it cooled down, and that just ain’t appetizing, folks. There are plenty of other options, such as a roux of flour and butter or flour and oil; masa; arrowroot; heck, even brown gravy mix! Jeff relies heavily on the corn starch slurry, which makes some recipes too gelatinous. Moving on: the (under-seasoned) chicken cutlets were sautéed in the IP, so yay for one-pot usage; however the prescribed time barely put any color on them. As Chef Anne Burrell says, “Brown food tastes GOOD!” This was beige food at best. I ignored him and kept sautéing, hoping not to fall into the trap of cooking too much early on, not understanding how long it would cook again in later steps. The mushrooms also could have done with a little more time in sauté mode, but the quantity vs. the space inside the pot was probably the deal-breaker. Mushrooms will never cook properly if the pan is too crowded (they are full of moisture!) so they end up sweating too much without caramelizing. It’s Julia Child 101. What resulted from this effort was a passable but not exceptional Chicken Marsala. To be fair I didn’t have actual Marsala wine, so we used a rando dry red wine, and I subbed in onion for shallots (since I am still in No-Shop January), so perhaps that accounted for some of the blandness. Nah; I think I’ll just blame the wedding caterer again!

Ah yes, the recipe that really should have been first, since 99% of newbie IP purchasers don’t do anything else with it: #12 Hard-Boiled Eggs! Also I made that statistic up, but I would place money on the odds that I am close. There are 487 methods of “correctly” boiling eggs (another wildly inaccurate statistic, but you get the idea) and I have tried quite a few in my day. Some of my favorites are: 1. Boil the water first, then place room temperature eggs in the pot once it’s rolling; 2. Place the eggs in COLD water, then slowly bring the temperature up over medium heat, and as soon as it boils, turn off the fire and slap a lid on the pot for 10 minutes; 3. Never use fresh eggs; only use ones that are three weeks from purchase date or older; 4. Once done boiling for 15 minutes, rinse the eggs with cold water and stick them in the fridge; 5. Boil the eggs with vinegar; with salt; with eye of newt and wing of bat! Honestly, the list goes on and on, but I have gotten results that were all over the map no matter what I did. Look no further friends, for I present to you the “5-5-5” method! It’s really that simple; pour in a cup of water and place eggs on a handy-dandy egg rack (sold separately of course) OR lay them down on the trivet, anything that keeps them directly off the bottom. Manually cook for five minutes; Natural Release for five minutes (a.k.a. just leave it alone and wait for the timer to count up those minutes before doing a Quick Release); remove the lid and use tongs to move the eggs to an ice bath for five minutes. F-L-A-W-L-E-S-S. Now, I have done this numerous times, and occasionally I get distracted and forget about them sitting at one step or another. Luckily the pot shuts off after the initial cook, and while leaving them too long on Step 2 resulted in overcooking, the worst that happens is a green ring around the yolk. No real harm done other than aesthetics. Forgetting them in the ice bath? Completely fine. All you were trying to accomplish is stopping the cooking process, and it can’t get any more “stopped” once it cools down. I was excited about the fact that, barring a good episode of Supernatural making me forget that I was cooking anything, these eggs come out perfectly hard-boiled every time, never rubbery and never smooshy. An unexpected benefit I discovered is that for some reason this cooking method make the eggs eject from the shells like a fighter pilot punching out of a downed jet. The satisfaction of removing an entire shell in one piece is an unrivaled joy! One thing to note is the 5-5-5 method technically applies to a half-dozen eggs, and I don’t see any reason in the world why someone would want that few. For a full dozen eggs (the proper amount) the ratio is actually 8-5-5…but that doesn’t sound nearly as catchy!