Cooking Craze

The newest craze in cooking uses a new machine...the Instant Pot (an electric pressure cooker). The Colonel has been wanting to get one. He has seen many tasty looking recipes on line that use an Instant Pot and the other day he "pulled the trigger" and ordered one. After the Instant Pot arrived I bought an Instant Pot cookbook and we decided to make the Spanish Arroz con Pollo recipe within its pages.

As The Colonel cut up the onion, sweet red pepper and garlic, I lightly browned the chicken breasts in the Instant Pot. I removed the chicken and then cooked the vegetables.

When the vegetables were tender I returned the chicken to the pot and added the rest of the ingredients: tomatoes, paprika, oregano, crushed red pepper, white wine, water, rice and saffron.

The Instant Pot pressure cooked everything in 15 minutes.

The recipe called for the use of a natural release to depressurize which took about 40 minutes. When it was time to open the pot this is what the Spanish Arroz con Pollo looked like once I added the peas.

This is what the finished recipe looked like in the cookbook....

This is what ours looked like when plated up....

They never look like the pictures in the cookbooks!

The Spanish Arroz con Pollo was good but I had expected it to have more flavor. The chicken was fork-tender though. The Colonel and I are looking forward to trying more recipes with the Instant Pot.