Food!

My sister talked me into buying this thing called an Instant Pot.  It's an electric pressure cooker.  Amazon was having a Black Friday sale on them and I jumped on it.

My mom's stove top pressure cooker used to scare the heck out of me.  I refused to use one for canning and found other methods.  Stories of those things exploding were just too much (although I suspects the stories were much over exaggerated since I've never known anyone who actually knew of one exploding for real). But they made constant noise and hissed and just looked weird.

And then I guess they invented these electric models that are so much safer and "cool".  LOL!  There is this whole huge community of IP fanatics.  Seriously.  IP stands for Instant Pot.  They have lots of acronyms for using this thing.

The fabulousness of the IP is that you can cook things FAST without drying them out and if you can't take it out of the pot right away, it stays hot.  It can also be used as a slow cooker.  This darn thing has so many features that it's quite amazing.  I haven't even begun to learn them all.

One of my first dishes was rice.  Yep, just plain ol' white rice.  It took like 10 minutes and was a perfect sticky rice like you get at the Chinese restaurants.

Next I made soup.  This is a copycat recipe of the Zuppa Tuscana soup from Olive Garden.   It's in a pan on the stove in this picture because I forgot to take a picture in the IP.  It made a HUGE batch so I was reheating it for a second meal on the stove.  It was beyond delicious!  Here's the link to the recipe:  Recipe

I've also made hard boiled eggs, YOGURT (this is super cool and so yummy but pictures of yogurt just aren't that exciting) and caramel from a can of sweetened condensed milk to add to brownies.  And then this.  Loaded Macaroni and Cheese!  Oh my.  This will now be my go to recipe to take to pot lucks.  Here is a link:  Recipe

This makes a BIG pot of Mac & Cheese.  I sent over a pan of it to my neighbor who has two young boys and they loved it.  It's kid approved for sure.  I didn't use any fancy cheeses (I had some leftover Velveeta and used about 8 ounces of it which I normally wouldn't use!).  Next time I'll go a little more gourmet/adult and see how it tastes.  I'll also toss it in the oven to crisp up the edges a little because I like those chewy hard edges around the pan.  The bacon topping gives it crunch but not exactly what I need.

Dang, am I going to need to rename my blog to add cooking and decorating or something?  LOL!  I am far from a great cook but I do love great food.