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Cooking under pressure, frozen to perfectly cooked in 30 minutes
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You have all done it before, gone to the fridge for something to eat and there is nothing there. Plenty in the freezer: steaks, shrimp, sausage, chicken. Chicken is what I craved yesterday for lunch but it was a rock hard, frozen brick. I didn’t have the patience to wait for it to thaw even with the help of a microwave and then baking it.
The proverbial light bulb
All of a sudden a light bulb went on and if I was a cartoon character, which some say I am at times, you would have seen the light bulb go on over my head. I pulled out my flea market $5 pressure cooker, threw in a large frozen bone-in chicken breast and a frozen bone-in chicken thigh. I added leftover marinara sauce, poured red wine in the sauce jar and shook it to get all the excess sauce and that went in the pressure cooker as well. I threw in rough chopped celery and onion, whole baby carrots, dried oregano and basil. A tad bit more liquid, water, just enough so everything remained moist and put the top on and turn it on high until it hit pressure and then turned it down. I let it cook for 20 minutes, turned off the heat and let it rest for 10 minutes and it depressurized on its own.
It was perfect, not overcooked. From a frozen brick to properly cooked in 30 minutes – gotta love the pressure cooker. A food friend of mine admonishes me for working with such an old time model pressure cooker but my mother-in-law trained me on this model and it works for me.
New, safer models
There are newer, safer versions out and if you don’t have a pressure cooker in your kitchen get one – you can make so many things quick and fast. I can do a chicken stock in 30 minutes. So back to my food friend, Jill Nussinow has written a cookbook, Pressure Cooking: A Fresh Look at Delicious Meals in Minutes and has a DVD on cooking with a pressure cooker. She is a vegetarian but we won’t hold that against her will we my carnivorous friends?
I was thrilled with the results of my frozen chicken experiment. Any pressure cooker stories out there that you care to share?
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