I like having a separate rice cooker, so I can have this over rice! But I am giving away my 37 year old rice cooker (because of the new Zojirushi) and the old crock pot. Which wasn't that old. But I don't have cupboard space for extra appliances.

The Instant Pot makes great rice. The key is to have an extra metal pot insert. When you have that, you just have to swap out the inserts and you're good to go.

Of course, I've heard the Zojirushi is great too, and if you already have one, I would find it hard to get rid of it.

Luckily, I don't have one. And if I get one, Mary Anna will kill me sigh deeply because we already don't have enough cabinet space for everything.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
The Instant Pot makes great rice. The key is to have an extra metal pot insert. When you have that, you just have to swap out the inserts and you're good to go.

Of course, I've heard the Zojirushi is great too, and if you already have one, I would find it hard to get rid of it.

Luckily, I don't have one. And if I get one, Mary Anna will kill me sigh deeply because we already don't have enough cabinet space for everything.

But I'd have to wait for either the rice or the curry to cook before starting the other!

Mr. AM gave me the Zojirushi for my birthday, because he knows I have been looking at them for 5 years and have not been willing to spend the money. It was very funny to get a rice cooker AND an Instant Pot for my birthday. My family likes to cook and eat. Me, too!

OK, what is the awesomeness of the Zojirushi?

My son got me a plain ol' rice cooker last year--my first ever. I LOVE it, and find it hard to expand my mind enough to figure out how it could be improved.

Teach me your ways, o ye cookers of rice!

Here goes nothing (I’m making the curry) (and my rice cooker is sooo old - it’s a Sanyo)

Mary Anna is currently making her maiden voyage of sausage and rice on the Instant Pot.

I have brainwashed her!

quote:

Originally posted by jodi:
Here goes nothing (I’m making the curry) (and my rice cooker is sooo old - it’s a Sanyo)

I think my Hitachi rice cooker is older than your Sanyo! The inner pot is pretty beat up aluminum, and we were trying to get away from that aluminum pot. The Zojirushi is overkill in that department, but it's very nice. Currently cooking tomorrow's steel cut oats in it, because I haven't figured out the timer function yet.

How was your curry? I didn't salt mine; I like to do that at the table.

Quirt, recipe?

Well, we're going to have to try again with the Instant Pot.

I wanted to make pinto beans and sausage, so we found an instant pot recipe for pinto beans. We had 12 ounces of beans and the recipe called for 16 ounces, so we adjusted the water accordingly. I did what I always do in the crockpot and added an onion and some smoked sausage. Then I accidentally cursed the proceedings by saying, "The only drawback to this thing is that you can't open the lid and check how it's doing."

Well, my best guess is that the water is not intended to be proportional to the beans. It needs to more than cover the beans to a depth that we didn't achieve after the sausage went in and took up space. It did cover the beans when the lid went on, but at some point the beans absorbed enough water to leave the top layer high and dry. This is not a good thing.

All of the beans were too hard to suit me, and the top layer was literally almost raw--hard and dry throughout. We also learned that sausage doesn't hold up well to pressure cooking, at least not for the length of time required to cook beans, because the texture was quite mushy.

We will persevere. I have a number of vegetarian bean dishes to try. There's an Ethiopian-spiced one that Quirt likes and I'd like to try dal in there.

I'll need to do some reading to see whether ham fares better than sausage, but the red beans and rice recipe I've been cooking all my life just isn't going to work. Cooking the sausage separately and stirring it in at the end defeats the purpose of flavoring the beans, and it defeats the purpose of the Instant Pot as a labor saver. The only difference between the crockpot and the Instant Pot for that dish is whether you start in the morning or at the last minute, and the crockpot lets you adjust the seasonings or add water as it cooks.

I'm sure the Instant Pot is wonderful for a lot of things and I'll find them, but this ain't it.

quote:

Originally posted by Mary Anna:
Well, we're going to have to try again with the Instant Pot.

I wanted to make pinto beans and sausage, so we found an instant pot recipe for pinto beans. We had 12 ounces of beans and the recipe called for 16 ounces, so we adjusted the water accordingly. I did what I always do in the crockpot and added an onion and some smoked sausage. Then I accidentally cursed the proceedings by saying, "The only drawback to this thing is that you can't open the lid and check how it's doing."

Uh-oh. That's what I've most been wondering - whether you can add different ingredients at different points in the cooking (depending on how much they require).

I gather the answer is, NO!

And the other thing I've been wondering is: what's the difference between the Instant-Pot and a Crock Pot in results, except that one goes ultra slow and the other is - instant?

I had hoped at the very least, meat (mind you I'm mostly vegetarian, but skip that part) would come out butter tender. Is THAT true? Once more I cooked flanken for our holidays and once more it came out ultra stringy after I cooked it overnight on slightly over 200F (after ALMOST cooking it - it was tender as heck), the night before.

I don't know what's going wrong, but it IS. And the flank steak was VERY expensive too. The main reason I didn't get the Instant Pot I discussed on here so much, is my younger son told me not to - under any circumstances (his voice sounding brittle, in a "don't ask me why" way). I admit I'm hard to shop for and I think he wants to "surprise" me with it when he comes for Channukah. Now that he has a good job he likes to treat me.

So perhaps this whole discussion is moot unless I can come up with another strong druther to drop hints about - to substitute for this one (hoping he hasn't already gotten it on sale or something. Doubt it on account of shipping costs. If it's not on Amazon, it doesn't happen...)

Anyhow, does anyone care to respond to my initial questions? Mary Anna's narrative kind of alarmed me. How can anyone cook a mixed dish without various ingredients getting treated differently?

I really liked the way everything was cooked. I followed AdagioM’s recipe, though I added some chopped celery too. I used the whole can of lite coconut milk. I have the mini - I used two big chicken thighs with their skin on, and tossed them in to sauté and brown up with the onions. I pressure cooked (on the stew setting) for 14 minutes, I let it depressurize on it’s own, but after about 17 minutes I flipped the vent switch to hurry it up. Then I added more spinach and let it wilt (the other spinach was no longer bright green).

I ended up adding a big spoonful of the salty chicken stock concentrate I keep in the fridge. After it was done - mine really needed more seasoning than just the 2 T of curry seasoning I had in my cupboard. It still felt like it needed something else spice-wise - it may be that my curry powder was lacking. We ate it with some mango chutney on the side and some cashews on the top. I am looking forward to trying more dishes in this! Seems like I can almost cook “last minute” stuff that used to take way more prior planning.

We'll try the pj curry recipe soon, since y'all are having such good luck with it. I figure we had to have one fail to keep us from getting cocky.

PJ puts cardamom pods in his curry, but I never think ahead and have that.

I'm out of curry from Market Spice, so I'm currently using The Now Curry from Penzeys, and it has a bit of kick to it!

Definitely needs salt, but I always feel bad dumping in oodles of salt, so I use my salt/pepper grinder at the table.

I made split pea soup and used pre-cut ham cubes for the meat. The soup texture was lovely and velvety; the meat was a bit squidgy but it was an ok tradeoff for me since it saved me work/time. I usually use a ham hock, but there isn't much meat on them, and I wanted to try something with less fat, too. (My sister pre-boils meat and skims off the fat, but I'm far too lazy. I *will* do that for oxtail stew, though. Fat city!)

I have seen recipes for IP where you partially cook, vent, add more ingredients, vent, add more. But I could be doing that on the stove!

Waiting for my fail. I'm going to make rice porridge again, but use brown rice per Mr. AM's request. I can see that not coming out right. We shall see...for white rice it's one turkey drumstick, 3/4 cup rice, 7 cups water. I think I processed it 30 minutes for white rice porridge. Brown will take longer, I'm sure!

Just had the leftovers from last night for dinner. (The mini made enough for 3 big or 4 small meals, and I probably could have put more in the pot). I really like the way it cooked the chicken to “falling off the bone” so quickly, and the whole thing was even better tasting tonight. The cauliflower kind of falls apart and makes the sauce thick, and some of the potato fell apart, but there were still nice chunks to bite into. Super yummy. Thinking chicken cacciatore (don’t know if I spelled that right) would also be good - I like to make it with bone in chicken thighs.

Does the Instant Pot do well with chicken breasts? I prefer dark meat, but Quirt likes light meat. I imagine that it doesn't do well with both light and dark, and light meat might be too delicate for it.

I don't know about white vx dark meat; I've only done dark, in the curry, and a turkey drumstick in the rice porridge. Currently making brown rice porridge (what a weird idea, Mr. AM!)

Jodi, I love chicken cacciatore, and found this recipe. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks like a good jumping off point. Chicken cacciatore

And Mary Anna, it's made with chicken breasts, so white meat!