Week 15: Presser Cooker Cooking

Pressure cookers have always been a mystery to me. As a kid, I remember this scary, whistling, dangerous pot on the stove. My mother was burnt a few times and boy those are nasty burns! Well a few decades later, it seems pressure cookers have gone hi-tech! A few years ago, I got a pressure cooker for Christmas, but this was no ordinary whistling scary pressure cooker, but a German designed, hi-tech, hard to get burned pressure cooker! I got a WMF Perfect Plus pressure cooker and a wonderful cookbook called, The Pressure Cooker Gourmet, by Victoria Wise. If you have a pressure cooker, get this book!

I love the concept of short cooking times with the taste of cooking in the oven. I still have some work to do with cooking in the pressure cooker and need to try some more recipes. My favorite way of cooking cabbage is in the pressure cooker, it takes 5 minutes of cooking and 5 minutes of cool down. Easy and awesome. So that has been about all I have cooked in my pressure cooker until this past weekend, when we decided to make game hens! Big step I know, but the recipe sounded so good, Game Hens with Fig, Orange Zest, and Herb Couscous Stuffing in Honey Almond Glaze. Yum! Total cook time was 22 minutes with 5 minutes of rest. We could have cooked the birds a little longer since we had monster game hens, so we microwaved them for a few minutes, but the pressure cooking method was easy. We definitely need to work at this, but I think this is a great way to cook a little hillbilly. Have fun and don’t be afraid to cook with a modern pressure cooker.

Recipe credit to: Pressure Cooker Gourmet, by Victoria Wise