pressure cookers was Re: Need recommendations on security

"Mike Easter" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
news:[email protected]...
>
> You'll find that creating recipes for your pressure cooker is great fun.
> You start with following the guidelines provided by the recipes which
> typically come with the cooker or in pressure cookbooks, because almost
> all cooktimes are drastically reduced, so those adjustments need to be
> made from your normal and previous cooking experiences.

nod

>
> Then you build your own recipe ideas from the 'elements' of how to cook
> various vegetables or meats or whatever and adjusted for what you like.
> Some things are greatly reduced in cooking time, like dried beans from
> scratch, while others, like rice, aren't affected very much.  But the
> 'difficult' rices, like brown or wild [which is actually grass seed] are
> helped a lot by the cooker.  Since I like rice a lot and like different
> cooking time rices together, I have a technique for two staging my rices
> in a metal container inside the cooker.  Sorta like you would cook rice
> in the oven.

I really do like it for dried beans and also because I can have a mad idea 
to have something for dinner that normally takes a couple or so hours of 
cooking and start at 6 and have it for dinner before bedtime.

Hrmm I always make rice in the rice cooker and somehow we pretty much have 
only basmati rice 99% of the time. I will try brown rice in the pressure 
cooker tho cause it doesn't do that well in the rice cooker -- or didn't 
last time I tried it.

>
> One of the reasons I like to build my own recipes is because I don't
> like to spend a lot of time with prep or cleanup -- or with the actual
> cooking for that matter.  So I design my recipes to be as painless and
> lazy as possible.

It's strange -- when I had to drive back and forth to work I was more 
tolerant of prep and long cooking times. Now that I telecommute and am 
actually around to theoretically putter around in the kitchen, I hate it. If 
it takes more than 15 minutes of prep or 45 minutes or an hour to cook or 
requires more than two dirty pots I'm just not interested ... Intuitively 
this makes no sense at all.

I am a sort of "follow the recipe except when I don't" (which is most of the 
time) person -- except for cakes and certain breads. But yes, once you use 
it a few times for various types of foods so that you get an understanding 
of the timing then doing your own recipes is pretty easy. I made the best 
corned beef I have ever made using the pressure cooker which means that 
instead of making it once a year and having the family stare at it and go 
"oh, corned beef" I can now plan to make it more regularly and they say "OH 
CORNED BEEF!!!!"

For the life of me, I can't figure out why I didn't buy one of these years 
ago -- I guess some memory of hearing people talk about having the old 
fashioned ones "blow their gaskets" all over the kitchen. The new models 
seem to be easier to deal with. I vaguely remembered my mom having one when 
I was very young and then she stopped  using it and so I finally got around 
to asking her a few months ago why she stopped.  She said that the jiggle 
thing broke or something and she couldn't afford to buy a new one at that 
time and then somehow never got around to it and still regrets that she 
never did :-)


Ellen