Ode to a Pressure Cooker

"Mamma, when's it going to be time to eat?"

Cries a precious little angel sweet.

"No worries, my darling dear,

In the blink of an eye, supper will appear!

Neither by magic or even take-out,

Give me 15 minutes and watch that top-valve spout!"

Whoever said I have to cook all day?

With my pressure cooker bubbling, move over Rachael Ray!

I have a new cooking obsession.....

When Eric's mom was here for Spring Break, she told me about all the wonderful meals she makes in her pressure cooker.  I could hardly believe her.  I was always under the impression that pressure cookers were for grandmas who love to can difficult items, like vegetables and meat.  They always sort of intimidated me, like it was some sort of ticking time bomb, that if not properly handled would explode or leave you with permanent debilitating scars on your face from the steam.

To prove her point, she bought me a pressure cooker and demonstrated it's amazing capabilities on four frozen chicken breasts.....frozen to done in 20 minutes!  Not just done, but juicy and falling apart goodness, the perfect kind for shredding!

I was sold.

It seems like a mini-miracle to me.  Frozen chunks of meat are put into a time-warp in which they are transformed into moist, fall-off-the-bone, melt-in-your-mouth meals!

Since then I have experimented with cooking all sorts of meats, either fresh or frozen.  Sometimes the results were not fantastic.  The Easter ham was cooked way too long....45 minutes (it was FROZEN, by the way!)  I neglected to take into consideration that we live at sea level, and therefore things cook much faster than at Eric's mom's house.  Next time do it in 30.  However, we have had some pretty amazing barbeque pulled pork sandwiches (2.5 pound frozen pork roast, cooked for 50 minutes), and delicious chicken teriyaki and rice (3 frozen chicken breasts, 15 minutes, with Costco's Mr. Yoshida's sauce).  The pork chops I found in the back of the freezer, which were probably a good three years old, cooked for 15 minutes and were....edible.

Instead of stocking up on frozen prepared and processed foods, I now have a freezer full of pork and beef roasts, chicken breasts, and bone-in chicken thighs.  I no longer have to save those frozen packages of meaty goodness for Sundays, when I have time to thaw them out and cook them for hours.  We have shredded chicken on green salad on Monday, shredded chicken enchiladas on Tuesday, beef pot roast and potatoes on Wednesday, chicken salad sandwiches on Thursday......the list goes on!

It is a busy mother's dream!