Yesterday afternoon, while wife kitteh was out doing something for Jesus and the hungry, I stumbled down to the kitchen to figure out dinner. As usual, nothing was thawed. Sifting through the wreckage in the freezer, I came across a trio of beef short ribs. Hmm. They're good slow-cooked, but they were frozen solid. What to do?
Recalling my Organic Chemistry and Heat Transfer classes, I realized the warm fluids can thaw frozen things. Eureka! I had it! Put the short ribs in a warm bath and soon they would be thawed. Where could I find such a bath?
How about the InstaPot? Could I cook them, starting from a frozen block? There was only one way to find out.
Realizing that wife kitteh would never sanction such madness, I worked feverishly to throw things into the pot before she got back. This also gave me more time to drink and yell at the dogs.
I started with a cup and a half of water to make sure things didn't burn as they thawed. I tossed in a frozen, 2-cup block of homemade beef stock. In for a dime, in for a dollar, you know. Carrots, bell pepper, onion, thyme and rosemary rounded out the mix before I threw in the short ribs. Some Slap Ya Mama was added to keep things Catican Bayou-ish.
I set the Instapot for low pressure pressure cooking and gave it an hour to work its magic. I figured by then, everything would have thawed and I could gauge the mess, adding what seemed to be missing.
It worked splendidly. Using both water and the stock made it more of a soup than a stew, so when the hour was up, I bombarded the pot with corn starch, flour, file powder and even some Gravy Master. Think of it as the culinary equivalent of the Navy shelling Iwo Jima with every gun they had. The taste was lacking, so I added more Slap Ya as well as a bay leaf, some savory and who knows what else.
I resealed the Cauldron of Instantiation and set it to high pressure cooking for 30 minutes. By then, wife kitteh was home, but there was nothing she could do. Like Dr. Frankenstein's therapist, once the monster had been created, the best she could hope for was to keep the damage to a minimum.
It came out great. The fluids never thickened, but it tasted fine. Serving with a slotted spoon got you all the meaty and vegetably goodness. The odd sloshes of the broth were sopped up with French bread.
Lesson Learned: You can skip the thawing and go straight to cooking if you want to do a stew, soup or other slow-cooked meal.
Pi Update
The new HQ camera works with the Pi4, but not the Pi3. Argh. I bought it for the Pi3.
Since I have to get to work, I don't have time to debug or play with it. Double argh.
5 comments:
You're quite mad, you know.
So, I take it you recommend the InstaPot, then?
It's a lot easier to cook like that if you live alone and don't have to worry about anyone else's approval.
Tim, for me, the InstaPot is the Pot of Last Resort. Wife kitteh likes it much more than I do. I much prefer cast iron on a gas stove, just like Meemaw used when we were growing up in Conecuh County*. The InstaPot is too sterile for me. I'm glad we have it, but I rarely use it.
* - No facts were harmed in the writing of that sentence. I did not actually grow up in Conecuh County or anywhere near it. There was no Meemaw.
OK, good to know. My normal approach to cooking stuff like this is also to put it in a big pot on the stove and let it simmer for a few hours, and I'm still using cast-iron cookware (some inherited from my mother and grandmother, and others that I later got from the hardware store). One more appliance would just clutter up the kitchen, so I'll probably give the InstaPot a miss for now.
If I tried that I just know it would turn out like pig swill. I guess you have the culinary equivalent of green thumbs. [Or green fingers as is said in UK.]
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