The Yum Yum Factor

Holy crap, I have been so busy cooking for other people that I have not even had time to cook at home, apart from a grilled cheese here and there. I have a few down days before plunging back into the fire next week so, in an effort to practice what I preach, it's time to get into my own kitchen. I have some interesting recipes that are not quite ready for prime time that will be coming soon, but, in the meantime,  I am still going through some of my favourite crock pot recipes and adapting them to the Instant Pot  since it is supposedly almost mid November and should be feeling like winter by now. I know that most of you think of ribs as a summer BBQ dish but for me, it's always been more of a winter thing so  I have started eyeballing the pork ribs at the butcher. I used to either do them slow and low for hours and hours, wrapped in foil in a low oven or all day in the crockpot for days when I am going to be out too long for that. The problem with the crockp...

First of all, I want to make it clear that this is NOT a magic, super fast pressure cooker stew recipe but it is still easier and quicker than doing it on the stove and the flavour is more intense so the extra steps are worth it. One the issues faced with making beef or pork stews in my Instant Pot is the disparity in cooking time for the meat vs the vegetables. I find that most stews leave me with vegetables that are about to disintegrate by the time the meat is cooked to perfection. To avoid this, many recipes will tell you to keep the vegetables almost whole to avoid this but I also don't want a bowl of stew with giant chunks of carrot and potato either.  When it doubt, I turn to Serious Eats to see how they deal with the dilemma. I like to call it WWKD (what would Kenji do?) I adapted his method to my recipe and it works beautifully but if you really insist on making it even easier,  you don't have to brown the cut up vegetables. You can always just throw in the ...

It's summer. It's a bazillion degrees out there, you are invited to a BBQ and BAM! You are asked if you could bring dessert. If it were just your own family, you would throw a fiver at them and tell them to run to the store and bring back a bag of Mr Freezies but that isn't going to cut it. There is no way you are turning on the oven, so baking anything is immediately out. You could do an ice cream thing but you would have had to start planning that yesterday and you have to transport it without it melting all over the place. You could stop at the store and pick something up on the way to the party, which is actually a perfectly acceptable option but I have a job to do here, so, for today, that is out too. That leaves a trifle. Sure, you can make all of the elements yourself if you want, but why would you want to do that in this heat? Trifle requires no special skills, no craftiness and it is almost impossible to mess up but it looks like you took tons of time...

I have been making tons of pasta in my Instant Pot but the final frontier, for me, was to make meatballs with sauce. I will apologize now for the lack of beautiful photos but, sometimes, I am truly just making stuff for our dinner and so there wasn't much time and the next thin I knew the whole batch had been gobbled up. Take the lack of beautifully staged, lit photos as a sign of it's irresistible deliciousness. My recipe for Rigatoni with Meat Sauce  is probably my most popular Instant Pot Recipe so far at home and online. Although I get tons of great feedback on this one from readers,  it's also a recipe that I make, myself, at least once a week for Shack. Because the Instant Pot has made it feasible to make this during the week he tries to trick me into making it more often but nobody needs to eat this kind of rib sticking pasta more than once a week and until he can figure out how to work the pressure cooker properly, he still needs me to make it for...

One of the most surprising things I have discovered since getting an Instant Pot is how well it does pasta. Because you cook the pasta right in the pot with the sauce, you are not wasting litres of water, it cooks in half the time and the flavours are much more infused and intense, which means I can get away with less and I always like to get away with less when I can.  RIgatoni with Meat Sauce                                                              Lobster Mac and Cheese                                                              Smoky Mac and Cheese Sometimes, I don't want a heavy pasta full of sausage or cheese and , to b...

It's throw back thursday and so I am sharing this recipe that I made back in March of 2011 for NoReEats and decided to make again tonight. I have made a few changes since I started making this dish in an effort to lighten it up without sacrificing any flavour because if that can't happen, I will always go with the original, full fatty creamy dish but, in this case, I am happy to report that it's every bit as delicious as the original version that sported a full cup of 35% cream. It's bad enough that we are putting bread crumbs on our pasta - we might as well just throw in a bowl of rice and some mashed potatoes, really. Think of it as an ode to carbs and just don't eat it every day. In the end, this pasta is everything I think pasta should be: quick, easy, flavourful and filling. Since we are leaving for our two week Jordanian adventure in a day and half-ACK- I am just trying to use up the food in the fridge and my fridge almost always contains arugula and b...

It's not every day that you are invited to a pickle tasting party, is it? I have been to wine tastings, beer tastings, scotch tastings and even chocolate tastings but this past weekend, my blogging buddy, Mom Who Runs  invited Shack and I to her home to taste pickles. She and I had talked pickles quite a bit and she knew that we are all mad for them and knew we would not say no. She asked me to bring something that would pair nicely with pickles and I drew a blank. I was thinking I could bring a bag of hamburgers or something or perhaps a pound of smoked meat, a loaf of rye bread and a case of Cott's Black Cherry Coke?  I think a mild cheese goes with pickles and I had a ball of Trader Joe's burrata burning a hole through my fridge door. I also had a bag of Le Grand Garden Pesto  that I was dying to try and, as luck would have it, a box of baby kale in the fridge, a few yellow and red small tomatoes and a chunk of red onion.  Most of my best invention...

I love how a dish will take off in the blogosphere and suddenly you wake one morning and everyone but you is making cake pops or boozy popsicles. This seems to be happening with this one pot pasta technique. Martha Stewart featured this simple pasta dish  this month and, once again, she has inspired the masses to go out and throw raw pasta with other stuff in a pot and just throw caution to the wind and do something that kind of goes against everything we all believe about cooking pasta. I was a bit leery but then, the more I thought about it, it made sense. We use the starchy pasta water all the time to not only thin out sauces but to utilize the starch to make the sauce more cohesive and silky. It kind of serves as a binder so this could actually work and if it DOES actually work , it could revolutionize week night dinner. If we all know we can just throw all the crap we have sitting in the fridge in one pot and 10 or 12 minutes later we will have a complete, healthy din...