I've been on a pressure cooker kick lately. I've had a Fagor stove top pressure cooker for several years now (gifted to us by my mom one Christmas) & I have always liked it, but felt unsure of how to use it most of the time. I used to have one standard recipe that I made in it, but I have been branching out lately & loving the results.
I will say the pressure cooker is AMAZING for making risottos! I can't possibly make a traditional risotto with a 4 year old in the house, but now I can in the pressure cooker & it's fabulous!! Note to self: post pressure cooker risotto recipes in the future!
It's also really amazing for making shredded chicken. Just cook chicken breasts a little longer than usual & then start pushing down on them with a spatula & they just fall apart into shreds!
When I was a kid on camping trips we would eat the canned Dinty Moore Beef Stew. I don't even know if they still make it, but I sure did love it. And anytime I eat stew or pot roast I am comparing it to my memory of the canned variety of my camping childhood days.
In more recent years I was eating a lot of Trader Joe's canned chicken stew. For some reason I stopped buying it (I think we just got tired of it) & then when I went to buy some once again they no longer carried it. :( (And seeing as I'm now gluten free I would bet that Trader Joe's chicken stew is NOT gluten free, so I wouldn't be able to buy it now anyways)
I've done a lot of googling for chicken stew recipes & all I've found are really difficult & complicated recipes, most of which require using a whole chicken. Not really what I was looking/hoping for.
So once I got started on my pressure cooker kick & started feeling more comfortable with using it I started doing some experimenting & making up recipes with it. One night I decided to try my hand at chicken stew & couldn't believe how good it turned out!
This was so casual & informal that it's almost hard to write an actual recipe for it. I cut up a couple of potatoes into cubes & placed them in the bottom of the pressure cooker (I do suggest a light spray of oil in the bottom just to make sure they don't stick). Then I cut up a few carrots & layered those on top of the potatoes. Then I cubed a chicken breast (or 2 depending on how many you're planning to feed) & layered that on top of the veggies. Now you just need a sauce/gravy to pour over it all. The first time I made this I used Imagine brand turkey gravy (it's gluten free!). But the next time I made it I made my condensed soup recipe, the cream of onion version (adding dried minced onion & onion powder to the base) & my hubby said he liked it even better than the turkey gravy version. I thought they were both pretty great.
So you put all of that into your pressure cooker & you seal it up & bring up to pressure. Then I lower the heat slightly (high enough to maintain pressure though) & cook 8-10 minutes. It's that simple. You could add on a side of biscuits or corn bread & have a complete meal. This is definitely better in colder weather, but I really enjoy it as long as it's not extremely warm.
