Pressure Cooker Smarts: green beans and whole new potatoes fast

One thing you have to understand from my Playing With Food page is that I’m probably not going to give you much direction or recipes and quantities. You either already know how to cook, for which I’m here merely for some inspiration or if boiling water is a challenge then you need to find other resources.

I mean, I hope you’ll hang around, but I rarely follow actual recipes myself and I’m usually winging it. That’s just the way it is with us creative types.

I use pressure cookers a lot. So much, in fact, that I own two nice european ones. A Fagor (Spain) and a Swiss Kuhn-Rikon. They are great time savers, not to mention energy savers, and product a really nice product. You should know, if you don’t have much personal history with pressure cookers, that these aren’t the ones with the ‘jiggler’ knob on the pressure vent like your Grandma used. The beans are not going all over the walls and ceiling. In fact, I’ve intentionally let them ‘go’ just to see what would happen with these modern ones, and they just dramatically release a lot of steam and dirty looking water downward onto the stove top. So get over it.

My husband likes green beans, but doesn’t like them al dente or crisp. He wants them tender, so I always use the pressure cooker, especially for my favorite Romano green beans.

 Pressure cooker Romano green beans with new potatoes and applewood smoked bacon, served with grilled salmon and a grilled slice of the low-carb spinach Bolani with sweet jalepeno sauce.

It’s just some little new potatoes, onion, bacon, the green beans and some herbs. Salt and pepper to taste. Most of the time spent making this dish is in the initial preparation. The actual pressure time, once the pressure cooker got up the the first mark (the lowest pressure, probably about 15 lbs) was only about five minutes. I’m not exactly sure because a friend called me while I was trying to time it … and I was drinking a Manhattan. You know how that goes. But total, absolute total time from start to finish on the plate: not more than 20 minutes.

These beans work really well with the Penzeys’ Ozark Blend seasoning on them, as it complements the applewood smoked bacon from Whole Foods (their house brand).

http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeysozarkseasoning.html?id=MYbcNJow

And really, with some nice artisan bread and some simple tomato soup this would be a nice main dish for those who watch their consumption of meat.

So look for a deal on a pressure cooker. There are some fine cookbooks out there with recipes geared for them. They just rock when you’re pressed for time, especially when doing whole grains up at altitude ( like in Reno), or just whomping up a tasty beef stew that tastes like it’s simmered all day but didn’t.

Below is a series of photos that show how it goes.

Prep your veggies and chop the bacon.

Saute the bacon, then add the onion and cook until it begins to get tender and smells really good.

Pour in enough broth ( either beef or chicken -and watch the sodium content there) to not quite cover the beans, having removed the bacon and onion.

Put the lid on and lock it place. Turn up the heat. Depending on whether you are at sea level or higher it will take about five minutes or a bit more to ‘come up to pressure’ or that first little mark. Don’t wander off during this step to watch TV. You have to pay attention here. Give it about five minutes at pressure, then kill the heat and put the still sealed pot under the cold tap to rapidly reduce the pressure so you can unlock the lid (see, safety is engineered in ).  Add the bacon and onions back in and combine. Serve.

Update on Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 09:14 by mavenandmeddler

If you are still on the fence about a pressure cooker, then here are a couple of books I recommend highly that should give you the confidence to forge ahead and get outstanding results:

“The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook” by Tom Lacalamita. The author gives his readers a comprehensive history of the pressure cooker and an understanding of how they work today and why. You’ll never fear a pressure cooker again after reading this. His recipes are very, very good, coming from his years living in Europe as a not-so-starving student.

“Pressure Cooking for Everyone” by Rick Rodgers and Arline Ward. This book is clean and straightforward, geared, perhaps toward the less adventurous user, but I refer to it time and time again because of the basic recipes and charts for such things as whole grains and various beans and legumes.

Now get pressure cooking!

maven