What made me think to post this was the 'what have you made to eat today' thread that I just posted a pic in. To make a long story short, we ended up with a new Crock Pot brand pressure cooker. It's not a crock pot, but Crock Pot brand, same as an InstaPot, but it's an electric pressure cooker. I'd always liked watching the pressure cooker infomercials and looking at all the good food they cooked. We've had it for several months, but I finally opened the box two or three weeks ago and tried it out.
I think the first thing I cooked was chili. Turned on the 'brown' option which allowed me to brown up the ground beef and small beef tips I like to put in for texture (along with onions, green peppers, etc), then dumped in the tomato sauce and all the other stuff and cooked it about 45 minutes under pressure to make sure the beef tips got good and tender. It was really good.
The next thing we tried was a pork butt to make carnitas. Cut the butt up into smaller pieces, browned it, put in spices, etc, and cooked 40-45 minutes. Fall apart tender. Then some chicken breasts and the same thing.
The great thing about it is that if you like to cook with a crock pot low and slow all day to make things tender, and we do, it shortens that time down to less than an hour in most cases. So you can decide you want one of those kinds of meals and you don't have to put it together in the morning and then cook it 6-8 hours. You put it together and it's done in most cases in less than an hour. Some in 20-30 minutes. So really no more need for the crock pot.
We've done several big chicken breasts for the third time already. Cook it up, eat what we want, then put the rest in the fridge to make different dishes out of all week and to help me with my low carb eating. You can have these great meals in a short time that used to take all day long in the crock pot.
I said all that to say this: yes, the pressure cooker has revolutionized the way we cook now.
First pic is some beef tips and pork chops cooked in the pressure cooker with cauliflower rice as a rice substitute. It's just cauliflower grated up like rice.
Attachment 4105
Attachment 4106
Attachment 4107