The Yum Yum Factor

I make my  Instant Pot Butter Chicken  fairly often but I don't always plan well enough to marinate the meat overnight and I do believe that an overnight marinade is essential to achieve a rich depth of flavour in the final dish and avoid it tasting like bland chicken plunked into delicious sauce. My theory was that if I added the chicken marinade ingredients INTO the meatballs, it wouldn't have to sit for so long before I can cook the finished dish. We also really, really love meatballs. A quick search for meatballs on The Yum Yum Factor will reveal my obsession with these orbs of tender delight so it stands to reason that I eventually try to meatballify every favourite recipe at some point. I have been mulling a meatball conversion with Butter Chicken for a while but I have been so busy cooking at work, that I have barely cooked more than scrambled eggs in my own kitchen all year but I finally got around to making it this week. don't be alarmed by...

You may have noticed that I am not keeping up with my regular pace on the blog. For the last 8 years, I've tried to add at least 1 or 2 recipes a week but my own cooking gigs have kept me out of my own kitchen since the fall. During the holiday season, I was so busy working for my friend in his catering company, that I barely made more than a piece of toast at home. Day after day, I would break down up to 40 lbs of beef into stew meat and then braise it all in the oven, making another 5 or 6 restaurant pans of scalloped potatoes, moussaka, or cutting up and marinating about a metric ton of chicken thighs followed by at least three evening parties a week so trust me, when I got home, we were ordering take out and apart from playing Candy Crush and checking twitter, I barely looked at a camera or a computer. December, in the catering business, is not for the faint of heart, weak of back or fallen of arches. Now, it's the new year and I am finally feeling like get...

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 ...

Some days I feel lazy. I don't want to haul out my spice bins, measure out a whack of them to make my own curry but I am starving and I just want to eat ASAP. I might be out of homemade chicken stock too so I will often just grab a box of my emergency stash of chicken broth (low sodium Campbell's for the most part) from the pantry and bag of curry powder. In the days of yore, this soup would have taken far too long for a last minute meal, requiring over an hour to simmer, but with a pressure cooker, suddenly it's doable for lunch. From the very start of chopping to the minute you lift the lid and ladle the soup into your bowl, you will squeak in just under the 30 minute mark, tops, under 25 minutes if you rush it with a ten minute NPR. My regular Indian Split Pea Soup takes an hour and a half to cook  Today, I was lucky to find a leek, a half of a giant head of cauliflower to use in place of potato so that my soup can have that thick heartiness that potato gives...

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...