Sometimes friends, you just have to admit when you are woefully out of your depth. This is one of those days of dizzying clarity, wherein I realize that I simply don’t have enough hours in the day to keep up with this Herculean task I have set for myself: cooking my way through The Step-By-Step Instant Pot Cookbook by Jeffrey Eisner. I am faced with two options: 1. Quit, because it is causing unnecessary stress in my life, or 2: Take a shortcut in order to meet the goal. Which means I actually have only ONE option, since quitting is not in my vocabulary. The problem isn’t that I have fallen behind on cooking the recipes. Oh no! The problem is that I have been cooking, despite my full-time job, my part-time job dealing poker, and my OTHER part-time job as a furniture artist. Oh yeah, and having a family and four cats who also need time and attention. I have managed to get about 50% of the way through this book (which I hoped to have completed by June; now I’ll be satisfied if I finish it before the end of 2022) but I have had very little time to dedicate to writing about it. Enter the solution that came to me at 6:00am this past weekend, when I should have been sleeping but I really, really wanted to get caught up on my blog: a down-and-dirty, brief round-up of the recipes I have completed in the past couple months. It will be bereft of much of the detail and story-telling I usually like to include but the thing will be published nonetheless, for anyone who happens to base their purchasing decisions of this cookbook on my reviews! So here go recipes #33-40, Cliffs Notes style…
#33 Premium Potato Salad. Bottom line, I like the recipe from the second Magnolia Table cookbook better (I’ll be blogging about that one someday, but for now let’s just say it’s the recipe to beat!) This one did have some unique attributes; you cook your hard-boiled eggs and your potatoes at the same time in a pressure cooker, which is a major time saver and dish-eliminator. Also there are a lot of flavors going on here, including bacon, chives, dill and cheese, but I question the value added from Russian dressing and apple cider vinegar. I wouldn’t say no to this potato salad on a picnic table, but if you want a home-run (in my humble opinion) check out Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia Table 2 recipe! 8 of 10, for being a bit overly fussy.
#34 Lasagna Bouquets. This was a hands-down winner at poker night, despite clearly not being a “bouquet”. I was supposed to use campanelle, but I’ll be damned if I go to the store just to get the right shaped pasta! All the great flavors of lasagna were in there, including the ground beef, (meatloaf mixture was even an option if you prefer!) mozzarella, ricotta and your garden variety onion/garlic marinara. I love anything that doesn’t require me to boil the noodles separately, and this fit the bill even though I went rogue on the pasta. 10 of 10!
#35 Rigatoni Bolognese. Another poker night recipe (a common theme with recipes which make a huge batch, plus this group eats anything I’ve cooked pretty happily!) Funny story: I doubled the recipe, but naively didn’t think too hard about the liquid volume I was adding. I realized too late that I had doubled all the ingredients in the pot…but now there was zero room for the pasta. Oh well, thought I, that just means cooking the noodles in another pot (which I hate – see above) but then I can boil the whole pound. Imagine my surprise when I opened up the IP to discover I had made… soup. Oh yeah, that pasta was kind of needed in order to soak up the doubled liquid! Oops. Alas, while it was not the recipe I intended to make, nor even a reasonable “sauce” for the noodles since it was rather thin, it tasted fantastic, as evidenced by the picture of someone eating the melange as an actual soup! 9 of 10 for my own error.
#36 Mushroom Risotto. It’s exactly like it sounds; risotto, but with mushrooms. This was rather dryer than Gordon Ramsay would serve on Hell’s Kitchen; I could almost hear him screaming, “You DONKEY!!” at me as I scooped out what looked like Rice-A-Roni, but it tasted fine anyway. Just don’t forget to use arborio rice!! 8 of 10 for being good but nothing spectacularly special.
#37 Sausage & Peppers Parmesan. I flat refused to eat this when I made it for (you guessed it) my poker crew. Spicy Italian sausage? Pass. FOUR bell peppers?? No thanks, though I did grow them myself. Despite the fact that it smelled amazing while cooking with lots of seasonings and onions and garlic, then became creamy with two kinds of cheese, I wanted no part of it. Even though it received rave reviews and several people went back for seconds, I was having none of it. Alas, I had to cave a day or two later when it was the only thing in the fridge and we’d made some pasta. We’d run out of buns and there was enough of this mixture to ladle over noodles like a sauce. I’m ashamed to admit I ate the whole bowl and it was freaking GOOD! Peppers:1, Opinionated Chef:0. Begrudging 10 of 10!
#38 Chicken Tortilla Soup. It’s finally getting to be soup season, but I made this ages ago, only because I had some avocados that needed using up. And somehow they didn’t even make it into the picture! My thoughts on tortilla soup is usually that the best part is the toppings: cheese, sour cream, avocado, tortilla strips… really it could be dishwater underneath all that and the soup would still be pretty good! This was certainly not dishwater, though I can’t recall specifics about it. Suffice it to say it was yummy and I’d make it again the next time I have a struggling avocado! 8 of 10 for not being especially memorable, but a solid recipe nonetheless.
#39 Sausage & Shells. Look at me, the original pasta rebel, using the ingredient the recipe called for! Don’t get excited, I just happened to already have it, otherwise you know I would have used anything vaguely pasta-related! This is a lousy picture (when compared to the photo in the book) because you can’t see all the things that really made it a stand-out recipe: spinach, fresh tomatoes, artichokes… There is a load of vegetables in here and you can’t even see them! Heck, even the sausage chunks seem to have settled at the bottom. You’ll have to take my word that despite my subpar photography skills, the recipe was delicious, hearty, and filling. Score one for the shell pasta! 10 of 10.
#40 Baked Potatoes. Last but not least… No, actually on this list, these potatoes really are the “least” exciting. This photo captured them at their most glamorous, if you catch my drift. Ok fine, the potatoes were raw when they went in, and cooked when they came out, and I suppose it cut the cooking time roughly in half to use the IP. But, and this is a big but, the texture of the skin is sooooo blahhhhh… I get that many people don’t eat the skin of a baked potato anyway, but for me this is sacrosanct. There is nothing better than a nice crispy skin baked with flavored olive oil brushed on and herb and garlic seasoning rubbed in. It is hands-down my favorite part of the baked potato experience and you don’t get that here. If you’re in a hurry and don’t care about “the skin in the game”, then knock yourself out with the Instant Pot; in half an hour you’ll have a satisfactory potato on the plate! 5 of 10; cooked, but boring!
Have Book, Will Cook 