sweet potato chicken curry

As I mentioned in another post, I bought a couple sweet potatoes with no thought as to what I'd actually do with them. The first recipe I made, sweet potato chili, came out great. Here is another recipe I tried this past weekend, which is for the Instant Pot.

I was skeptical about curry. It's not something I typically eat. I made chicken curry once for my husband before we were married, but that was many moons ago and I don't remember if I liked it or not. I don't know if he liked it either. Probably not, since I had no idea at that time that he was so plain-vanilla about food.

I was happy to find a recipe for the Instant Pot, since I don't use it for much other than large batches of seasoned rice and hard boiled eggs. I settled on sweet potato chicken curry--I had a lot of chicken in the freezer and a sweet potato to deal with.  The only thing I had to buy was curry spice (dollar store!) and a can of coconut milk.   I skipped the cashews and cilantro. Cashews have a ton of calories and I can't control myself with them, and I'm not into garnishing my food so I skipped the cilantro.

It was easy to put together, and it was especially nice to just throw in the Instant Pot and cook it on high pressure for 12 minutes.  Unfortunately, I think I cut the sweet potato too small, because it pretty much disintegrated. The taste was there, but no chunks of potato. The onions melted away, too.

I liked the taste of this, and it was filling. I didn't put it over riced cauliflower or anything like that. I just ate it as-is. It was a nice change from the standard stuff I usually eat.

There are two changes I would make if I were to make this again.  I'm someone who likes chunkiness in my stews, so I would chop bigger pieces of onion and sweet potato.  Also, I'd probably pour it over riced cauliflower as suggested in the recipe in order to make it more substantial.

Here's the nutritional info (per cup) I got using My Fitness Pal:  284 calories, 13 g fat, 18 g carbs, 7 g sugar, and a whopping (!!) 23 g of protein. I'm quite surprised at the protein. I know the chicken contributes a lot, but that seems off to me. According to My Fitness Pal, the whole can of coconut milk is 14 grams of protein, so that adds a little more. If you decide to make this recipe, you may want to plug it into whatever food logging app you use and see what you come up with.

This is the recipe I made, which made six one-cup servings:  https://therealfoodrds.com/instant-pot-sweet-potato-chicken-curry/

quinoa with cumin and tumeric

I have a ton of spices in my cabinets that I don't use. I also have a bunch of grains I need to use up. Plus an Instant Pot and a day off from work.

Unused spices + lots of bulk grains + Instant Pot + snow day = quinoa with cumin and turmeric.

I don't even remember what I bought the turmeric for at this point.

I didn't want to make plain quinoa, since that can be boring. And I don't have a ton of ingredients in the house to make a quinoa salad or one-pot meal. After Googling for a bit I settled on this recipe, which you can find here.  The only change I made is I didn't add any fresh herbs. I just have them. Although I do have rosemary, but it's buried under a foot of snow at the moment and I wasn't going out there to get it.

This was really easy to make.  Just saute the smashed garlic gloves in olive oil, add the cumin, turmeric, salt, quinoa and water, and then set the Instant Pot for 1 minute at high pressure.

As far as taste, I felt this needed more salt and could have benefited from some onions. I also think it needs less water, as the finished result was a bit mushy and not fluffy like it should have been. I might make it again with the modifications I mentioned, and I might add some chicken to it, too.

weekly cookbook project: apple maple oatmeal; pot roast

I've kept up with my goal to make recipe per week from my cookbooks; however, I forgot to take pictures of two recipes I made recently.

Last week I made apple maple oatmeal from my Great Big Pressure Cooker Book. It was simply steel-cut oats, water, maple syrup, cinnamon and dried apples. Maple syrup took care of the sweetness, so no sugar was added. Dried apples were necessary, rather than fresh, so they stand up to being pressure cooked. It was good, but if I make it again I'd either add less water or more oatmeal; it was too soupy for us.

A couple weeks ago I made a pot roast from the same book (can you tell I like my Instant Pot??). It was a beef roast, beef stock, rosemary, bay leaf, onions, potatoes and carrots. All I had to do after pressure cooking was thicken the gravy and it was ready. I really liked this pot roast. In fact, I may not use my old standby recipe anymore:  pot roast in the slow cooker made with Lipton Onion Soup mix. What was nice about using the pressure cooking function vs. slow cooking was that the meat stayed intact. In the slow cooker it totally falls apart and becomes more like a beef stew. Pressure cooking makes the meat very tender, but it basically stays in one piece so you can slice it. It's good either way.  It depends on what your preference is.

I haven't decided what I'll make this week yet. Although, our anniversary is at the end of the week so maybe I'll find a special recipe for our anniversary dinner.

weekly cookbook project: balsamic and orange-glazed chicken thighs

In keeping with my goal to cook one recipe per week from my cookbook collection, today I made balsamic and orange-glazed chicken thighs from The Great Big Pressure Cooker Book.  I've been loving this book. The recipes, for the most part, are pretty easy and it gives me a chance to use my Instant Pot.

This was really easy. All I had to do was brown the boneless skinless chicken thighs, which I did right in the Instant Pot, whisk the balsamic and marmalade together and throw it in the pot with a rosemary sprig (cut fresh from my rosemary plant).  The only thing I needed to buy to make this recipe was the orange marmalade. I've never tried orange marmalade and since I've had weight loss surgery, I tend to stay away from jams and jellies--way too much sugar in them.

I was worried the finished dish it would be really orange-y tasting, or have a strong vinegar taste, but it was fine. It didn't have a vinegar taste, just a hint of it, really. And the orange wasn't overpowering at all. The vinegar, marmalade and rosemary all worked well together. I served it with my seasoned brown rice, which was fresh out of the Instant Pot, too. We poured the balsamic-orange mixture over the rice and it was delicious.

weekly cookbook project: chicken and pasta with a spicy peanut sauce

I posted recently that my goal this year is to cook at least one recipe per week from my collection of cookbooks.  I have 20 of them and pretty much never use them other than to look through them from time to time.

This week I made my first cookbook recipe for my New Year's weekly cookbook project:  chicken and pasta with a spicy peanut sauce.  It's from The Great Big Pressure Cooker Book. I really like this book.  It has a big variety of recipes; it gives notes with each recipe as to how to change things up, how to serve it, etc.; the introduction talks about what to do and not to do with a pressure cooker and why; and it's written with the Instant Pot/electric pressure cooker in mind.

I picked this recipe because I had all the ingredients. (Actually, I didn't have the whole wheat ziti or fresh ginger, but I had regular ziti and ground ginger; both of these worked just fine.) Also, I really wanted to use the pressure cooker function on my new Instant Pot.

Here are the ingredients for the recipe:

• ground allspice
• ground cayenne pepper
• chicken breasts
• ground cinnamon
• ginger
• peanut oil
• peanut butter
• chicken broth
• ground cloves
• yellow onions
• whole wheat ziti pasta
• canned diced tomatoes

I couldn't find the whole recipe on the internet and I didn't feel like typing it out, so I just included the ingredients. Basically, you sauté the onions, garlic and ginger in the oil and the add the other ingredients. The Instant Pot is set the pressure cook on high for 8 minutes and then you do the Quick Release to release the pressure. That's it.

We both liked this recipe. It had good peanut taste that wasn't overwhelming and, since I didn't use the full amount of cayenne pepper, it wasn't really spicy. Had I been cooking it for myself only, I would have used the full amount, but Bob doesn't like as much spice as I do. I think this would have been better over rice, though. Ziti in a Thai-inspired dish just seemed odd to me. My only complaint about this dish is how totally blah it looked. It was a big mass of brown. Even the ziti turned brown from the peanut butter.  Otherwise, I'd make this again.

happy belated thanksgiving!

I haven't had a chance to post since I've been winding down after the whirlwind that is Thanksgiving. All that preparation--cleaning, shopping, chopping--and it's over in a couple hours. Not even. It's a lot of work, but it's nice to spend time with family.

This year I made a huge turkey, even though I had a small crowd. When I bought the turkey I wasn't yet sure how many people were coming, so I bought a very large one--28 lbs! (I have a big family.) Actually I bought two turkeys, because the price was so good and on my first shopping trip they didn't have anything bigger than 15 pounds. Although I would likely need something bigger, I got one anyway since it was only about $8.00 and I figured I'd keep it in the freezer for Christmas or something. Then on my second trip a few nights later I found a 28-pounder. I didn't set out to get something that big.  It just happened to be the first one I picked up and I went with it.  After we took the turkey out to defrost, we found out that we would have a small crowd. Rather than put it back in the freezer we decided to cook it. At least we'd have a ton of leftovers!

I'm glad we decided to check to make sure the turkey would fit in one of my roasting pans. It fit in my biggest pan, but the rack that comes with that pan is pretty flimsy, so I set off to find a new roasting rack. I could have used my rack, but the turkey would have been sitting directly on the pan due to sagging of the rack. I also thought about using very thick slices of onions, carrots and celery as a makeshift rack (thank you, Google!), but those would eventually disintegrate and leave the turkey in contact with the pan. The idea of a roasting rack is to have airflow under whatever you're roasting and to have the juices drip off away from the meat. Another reason I really wanted a new rack is because I wanted one with handles that would allow me to lift the turkey. A 28 lb. turkey is very heavy, and I just didn't feel confident that I wouldn't drop it on the journey from pan to cutting board. I stopped off at Bed Bath and Beyond earlier this week and found a rack with handles.  It was under $20.00, plus I had a 20% off coupon to boot.

As usual, I scoured the Interwebs for turkey cooking times and temperatures, different ways to cook it, recipes, etc. (I really don't know why I do that. I trust I can cook a turkey and all it does is suck me in and waste time.) But in the end I went with the old standby of salt and pepper to season it, bagged stuffing mix with onions, celery and sausage added, and cooked it at 350 degrees for a little over six hours (13 minutes per pound of turkey).  It came out great. (In honor of my late mother, I ate the neck. She always raved about the neck meat and usually ate it while cooking the gravy.  I always scoffed at it, but it really has delicious meat on it. MIL had a couple bites, too.)  Something I did differently was to add the bag of giblets to the bottom of the pan, along with celery, carrots and onions, plus a healthy dose of water to start the gravy. To finish the gravy I added a can of turkey stock, skimmed out all the solids from the bottom of the pan, and added the cornstarch and water mixture to thicken. I liked the way the gravy came out, but I neglected to add salt and pepper, which I'll have to remember next time. It still tasted good, though.

I also made an apple pie and made the crust from scratch. It came out pretty good. I'm getting better at making crust. I just have to remember to not overwork it, as that is what makes it tough. Something I differently here was to cook the filling first, let it cool down and then fill the crust. That allowed the apples to cook down a bit, which eliminated a soggy bottom crust since the juice was already cooked out. It also helped the pie keep its shape. Rather than having a big dome of crust about 3 inches above the filling, the shape it was in when it went into the oven is the way it came out. See below.

Along with the turkey I had corn, mashed potatoes, carrots, stuffing, cranberry sauce, homemade cinnamon applesauce, and dinner rolls. Dessert was the apple pie, a store-bought pumpkin pie, which wasn't very good, and store-bought cookies.

Oh, I almost forgot...my Instant Pot came to the rescue. I forgot to start the carrots and since I always make fresh, they would take a while to cook. I decided to throw them in the Instant Pot with about 1.5 cups of water and set it to pressure cook for 4 minutes. Viola! In about 25 minutes I had perfectly cooked fresh carrots. (It takes some time to get up to pressure and then depressurize after cooking. But it was all hands-off time and it freed up the stove top for other things.)

I also tried something else this year:  I made the mashed potatoes around 11 am and then put them in the slow cooker on the low setting. When it was dinner time, around 2:30 pm, I just stirred them up and served them. They thinned out a bit, but it wasn't terrible. Just not quite as thick is when they were first made. I also put the finished gravy into my small slow cooker on Keep Warm. For some reason I had a timing issue this year, which I don't usually have. It seemed like things finished up quickly, when usually I'm scrambling around trying to pull it all together. Maybe I was too prepared?  I don't know.

And here's the turkey coma in effect. Well, not really. Only one cat got any turkey at all and that was because he looked about ready to jump onto the table during dinner. I figured giving him a little turkey would stop him from embarrassing us in front of everyone. I normally locked them all up in the upstairs bedrooms, but this time I thought I'd try and trust them. They did well, I have to say.

Now that the big day is over, I have to figure out what to do with all those leftovers. I have a lot of mashed potatoes, so I'm thinking either a shepherd's pie or cheesy potato pancakes. Maybe I can combine them with the turkey to make croquettes. And the stuffing. Well, I'm not sure what to do with that. And there's SO much of it!! If I decide to get creative I'll be sure to post it here.

Now it's on to getting ready for Christmas....

seasoned brown rice in the Instant Pot

Last year I found a recipe for seasoned rice, which I've been using ever since:  it's cheaper than buying Rice-a-Roni and you get a whole lot more.

I recently bought an Instant Pot, which I'm loving, and decided to try and make rice in it.  I Googled to determine the correct rice to water ratio, since I'd seen a lot of people posting that the Instant Pot ratios don't seem to be correct.  The ratio I found that works for me is 1 cup of rice to 1.25 cup of water using this method.  So, I revised my seasoned brown rice recipe to work in the Instant Pot.

It came out great and tasted just like it should. It was cooked perfectly.  I made a double batch and froze most of it.

Seasoned Brown Rice

This recipe can easily be doubled.

3 1/2 TB of Seasoning Mix (below)
2 1/2 cups water
2 TB butter
2 cups uncooked brown rice

Directions

1. Turn the Instant Pot on to Saute. Let it warm up for a couple minutes and then add 1 TB of the butter. Once melted, add the rice and toast for a few minutes.   
2. Pour the water into the pot and add the other 1 TB of butter.  
3. Add the seasoning mix and stir. Close the lid.
4. Press Keep Warm/Cancel on the Instant Pot and then press Manual and set to High Pressure for 15 minutes. Let it cook.
5. When the cooking is done, let the pressure naturally release, which will take at least 20 minutes or more. Don't use the quick release method, because the rice won't be quite done.  If you want to play around with the rice to water ratio and cooking times, check out this post I found.

Seasoning Mix
Makes enough to season two batches of rice.

2 TB dried basil
2 TB chicken bouillon granules
2 TB dried parsley
2 tsp onion powder
3/4 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp dried thyme

Combine all ingredients and store in an air tight container.

hard-cooked eggs in the Instant Pot

Last time I posted I said I'd let you know how it goes with the hard-cooked eggs.  Well, it was very easy, the eggs peeled in a cinch, and they were perfectly cooked.  The only issue was that two of them exploded out of the shell.  Not an actual explosion, really. They just burst out of the shell as they cooked.

All I did was put a cup of water in the pot, put a single layer of eggs on the rack that comes with the pot (I was able to fit 14 eggs), close it up and set the cooker to "Manual" and "Low Pressure" for 7 minutes. I then turned it off and quick-released the pressure. Rinsed the eggs in cold water and I was done!  Total time was about 20 minutes, since it takes about 5 to 10 minutes for the pot to come up to pressure.

The eggs were perfectly cooked. You can adjust the cooking time based on how done you like the yolks. Decrease for moist yolks, increase for firmer yolks.

Update:  Forgot to add that these eggs were SOOOO easy to peel!!  I'm convinced that this is the way to go when making eggs now. Almost nothing worse than a hard-boiled egg that won't let go of it's shell. More than once I've given up and just tossed the egg in the garbage because half the egg white is still attached to the shell.

 

Here's one of my exploded eggs. Looks funky, but it tasted just fine.

As you can see, there's a bit of a dark ring around the yolk, which is likely because I let them sit 2 extra minutes after cooking. 

my new Instant Pot

Recently the dial on my old slow cooker cracked and fell off. I was kind of happy, because I've been wanting to get a new one. One which has a timer and a "keep warm" setting.  Not necessary, but definitely nice to have since no one is home most of the day. Sure, I could use a pair of pliers to  turn it off and on, or I could scour eBay looking for a new knob, but I used it as an excuse to get something better.

I went online and asked for suggestions. Suggestions ranged from a Hamilton Beach model that has the settings I want, to just getting the same thing I have now, to the Instant Pot. I was intrigued by the Instant Pot and had never heard of it, so I researched the crap out of it. (Just like I always do when I need to buy something new.)

"What's the Instant Pot?", you say?  It's basically a slow cooker, pressure cooker, rice cooker, steamer, saute pan, and yogurt-maker (yes, it makes yogurt!) all rolled into one. That piqued my interest, because I've been wanting to try a pressure cooker, but couldn't justify spending the money, and I needed/wanted a new slow cooker. A rice cooker is nice, I guess. Never used one or felt I needed to use one, but what the hell?  I also liked the idea of being able to do my sauteing in the cooker and then switching over to the pressure cooker or slow cooker function. What's even better is that it would take up the same amount if space in the cabinet as my current slow cooker, which is important because I have a very tiny kitchen in a very old house with not a lot of storage or counter space. So, yeah, I bought it last weekend.

Looks pretty high-tech!

I ended up with the 6 quart version. They offer an 8 quart, but I'd read on several websites that the 6 quart got more use on a daily basis and might be overkill for anything other than a large family or special events.  

The lid has a venting valve for pressure cooking, and it turns and locks so you know it's closed. It also plays a little jingle when you open and close it.

As you can see, the inner pot is stainless steel, which means I don't have this giant stoneware pot taking up the whole sink and strainer when I wash it. Plus, it's not mega heavy like that other pot. It came with a basket/rack to use when steaming (or something...), a couple spoons, a measuring cup and a condensation catcher for when you pressure cook. And probably one of my favorite things:  the lid fits into the pot's handle so you don't have to stand in the middle of the kitchen with a dripping, scorching-hot lid, looking for a place to put it.

My first experiment was beef stew, since I had a big package of stew meat sitting in the freezer.  I found a recipe, which you can find here, and adapted it for my own use. (It's a paleo diet recipe that calls for arrowroot flour, which I don't have and am not about to go out and hunt down, and either lard, ghee or avocado oil, none of which I have; I used regular flour and a bit of olive oil.) I have to say, it was so awesome to brown the meat in the pot, throw all the other ingredients in, and then switch it to pressure cooker. I only had the one pot to clean. And the stew was great. It tasted like it had cooked for hours, but the meat wasn't totally falling apart and the veggies weren't disintegrated as they would be in a slow cooker. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the finished stew. Sorry! But it looks like your standard beef stew, so use your imagination.

I was worried about the pot not being hot enough to saute, but that was a needless worry; it did just as good as a frying pan for the most part. And it got up to saute temperature very quickly, so don't go sticking your fingers in to test the surface. (Not that I did that or anything...) The other thing I was worried about was the release of pressure after the pressure cooking was done. I used the natural release method, which means letting the pot sit on "keep warm" for 15 or 20 minutes and allowing it to depressurize naturally. After 20 minutes it didn't show any signs of releasing, so I turned the vent very, very slowly and released the pressure myself. I was worried the thing would explode, because I know that it's heated ingredients under pressure. I was fine though. Nothing happened. No explosions with beef stew on the ceiling or all over myself.

This weekend I plan to try making hard-cooked eggs, and maybe some seasoned rice. I'll let you know how it turns out.

If you want to check out this cooker, here's the link:  Instant Pot.

(And, yes, as soon as I got it home and then went to Walmart for something, I found at least three other brands that make the same kind of thing for less. Story of my life.)