Cooking Under Pressure
I used to have a fear of pressure cookers. The hissing and jiggling that I remembered from my childhood were enough to make me stay away from the devices for a long time. It wasn’t helped by work-related encounters with huge pressure cookers used to sterilize petri dishes in a laboratory. So for many years, I was happy to wait patiently for meat to become fork-tender in a boiling pot. Not anymore.
With motherhood came the need to speedily accomplish tasks, be it folding laundry or making dinner. I bought a pressure cooker from Linens N’Things (aff) and have been cooking under pressure ever since.
Today’s pressure cookers have safety devices that my mother never enjoyed. Gone are the jiggling weights. Instead, there are safety valves and built-in pressure-release systems. Pressure cooking is easier. And it’s still as fast as ever.
I now use my pressure cooker to full advantage. Because I usually buy meat in larger packages, I almost always have more meat than I need for one dish. I cut up the extra meat and cook it in the pressure cooker for freezing and later use. Having the already tender meat available means that I will also save time when cooking a dish later on.
For more about Pressure cookers, read Monia Bhide’s “Pressure Cooker Basics, Fear Included” on the Washington Post.
Tags: pressure cooker, cooking, speed cooking, housekeeping, homemaking
My grandmother swears by her pressure cooker. When hers broke, I found her one online to replace it. I still haven’t made the leap. But it’s something worth trying.