Here’s the thing about me. I have a hard time making appropriate goals. I either overshoot or undershoot it. Or I have no idea what I should do with it. I bought an instapot (Instant Pot) several years ago. I mentioned yesterday that one of the things I want to do in the new year was to cook more. Or at all. This was back when instapots were the rage and peeople could not stop gushing about them. My brother had one, and he pushed me to get one.
I did my due diligence. I read up on instapots (what I call them), and everything I read made them seem like they would make cooking life a piece of cake (heh). All the recipes I read gushed about how life-changing it was to get an Instant Pot.
I was so eager to try it out, and the first thing I did was make mashed potatoes in it. That should have been simple enough, right? And I LOVE mashed potatoes.
Here’s the thing.
All the recipes assumed that you knew that you still had to prep the food and that you knew the instapot needed to be heated up first and then the pressure eased during cooking. This was not included in the ‘cooking’ time. So for something like mashed potatoes, there was no point using the instapot. In fact, it took twice as long to use the instapot than to do it in a saucepan.
The instapot came with a few quick and easy recipes including one for Kahlua pork or something like that. It had four ingredients and seemed really simple. It was for a family of four (which I am most emphatically not), so I quartered it. 2 pounds of pork instead of 8 for example. One of the ingredients was liquid smoke which I had never used in my life.
I had not read the recipe thoroughly beforehand. Here’s the thing. You had to brown the meat before putting it in the instapot. The recipe claimed you could do it in the instapot, but I could not figure it out. So I cut it up in quarters and browned it in a saucepan. And burned my forearm.
It was a mess. I also overcooked it. It tasted fine, but it was nothing spectacular, and it was more a pain in the ass than anything else.
When I talked about it with my brother, he said, “Of course you have to still do the prep and preheat it. And let the pressure out.” As if this was obvious. Which, to him, it was because he loved to cook and cooked a lot. It’s what I realized about the recipes as well. They were writen by people who cooked all the time, so they had a level of competency that they just assumed everyone had.