Tag Instant Pot

ActiFry, Instant Pot or Slow Cooker?

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ActiFry, Instant Pot or Slow Cooker?

One Big Pot!

Dieting is tough. If I don’t have the right food on hand, I’m going to eat the wrong food, right!?! Bulk cooking is a way to ensure that we always have a meal in a container. And if we’re lucky, it’s a meal that meets the dietary requirements for our current regimen. When it comes to bulk cooking, I want to make the maximum amount of food, with the minimum of fuss. And as little mess as possible. That usually means that I pull out my big 50 gallon pot. Or one of my one-pot wonders … the ActiFry, my Instant Pot, or my most recent acquisition, the slow cooker.

The benefit is that we can toss a bunch of stuff into any one of these things & hit go. Depending on which one gets fired up, we’re eating half an hour later. Or maybe we get to enjoy the cooking smells for 6 or 8 hours before we dig in. It’s our choice.

If speed is important, you just can’t beat the Instant Pot. It is fast, clean & efficient. The only drawback, & the failing in mine not the Pot’s, is browning. I don’t want to dirty another pan, so I brown my meat in the Instant Pot. I never deglaze properly &, as often than not, I get that burn warning when I close the lid. Forcing me to open it up, scrape the bottom of the Pot, & restart. For that very same reason, thickeners are better added at the end. That aside, this thing will turn old boots into melt-in-your-mouth food in double quick time. Depending on which model you go for, it does all sorts of other tricks. One of my favorites is the yogurt button. I like high fat yogurt & this thing does an amazing job with a no-boil yogurt. Though the cost for my preferred ingredients means that store-bought is probably still cheaper on sale. Since the pot liner is removable, cleanup is a breeze. This is a great little cooker.

Having ignored slow-cookers most of my life, I recently succumbed to peer pressure! With all day cooking times, having to think this far ahead was a little alien for me. But I found it surprisingly easy to get into the rhythm. Turns out that, as a morning person, it suits me. Toss a bunch of the appropriate foods into the crock, hit go, & come back later. Much later. I’m tired by the end of the day &, rather than cook, I tend to make poor choices with whatever is more readily available. If this baby is doing its thing all day, the cooking smells have me drooling by dinner time. And then it delivers! There were a couple of surprises here. The evaporative losses are minimal. So you wind up with almost the same amount of liquid at the end, as you started out with. This requires a little post processing if you want to thicken the sauce. The other surprise is that meat is tenderized to the point of falling apart. Yet the potatoes remain whole. How does that happen!?! Like the Instant Pot, browning may improve results. But you’ve got to do it on another pan. And that’s really the only downside. You don’t have to brown, but it does make the dish taste better. And look better.

The T-fal ActiFry is a well-used machine in our house! Diet or not, I like fried food. The first thing I did when I got this little beauty was toss out the little green spoon! You know the one? The instruction book tells you to limit yourself to two little spoonfuls of “heart-healthy” fat to make your French fries. Forget that! Hide that spoon & you will feel no guilt! I’ve tried everything in this. With & without the paddle. With & without the optional rotating basket. If you put enough fat in there, they all taste great. I generally use coconut oil or olive oil. But I’ve done bacon in the thing. And then used the bacon fat to cook French fries! Or mushrooms. Mmmmmmm! If you can stop fish sticking to the basket, that’s a great meal too. Other than the power cord getting a little hot during cooking, this little beast is great. I really like the flavor of the food coming from it.

My big pot! The good old fashioned saucepan. It’s a big thing with a small handle on either side, like little ears. You can beat this thing with a hammer, stir & scrape it with a metal spatula, or toss it outside the back door when the sink is full. The only downside is that you do need to sit it on the stove. For speed, it falls between the Instant Pot & the Slow Cooker. And, whether you need to or not, you’re going to come by to stir the contents every now & again. You can brown in it, but it too requires deglazing. Though it’s not as fussy as a lidded device. Its one big advantage is that liquids evaporate & the sauce thickens. Because you’re stopping by every now & again, it gets stirred & tasted. For a cook-by-feel person, that’s a plus. The other big plus of a plain old pot is its ability to release the flavors from spices. For me, that is mostly done by cooking the spices in hot oil for a few minutes, ahead of dumping in the major ingredients. By the time the cooking is done, this makes for a better blending of flavor than when you just add spices to the liquid in the pot.

So which one is best?

With the lidded-pots, you have to work a little harder to match the flavor of the regular old pot. But for convenience, you can’t beat these set-it-and-forget-it style pots. Fast or slow? Really depends on the day. The ActiFry is a totally different beast to the others. And it can be used by the low-fat & high-fat folk. Each one wins in a different way. But if you were to strand me on a desert island with just one, I’d probably have to stick with the trusty old pot.

Thankfully, I don’t have to choose. And they all have their place & space in my kitchen.

What’s your favorite?

Best One-Pot Cooking Appliances

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Best One-Pot Cooking Appliances

Slow-cooker makes a meal of it!

Over the course of my “career” in the kitchen, I think I’ve had just about every small appliance that ever showed up in the stores. Or on a TV infomercial. And over time, I found myself dropping off most of them to the local thrift stores. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now, wouldn’t you?

Not!

Just splurged on a slow-cooker the other day. Don’t know why, but this might be the only one I have never tried before. It was on sale, so my “big splurge” cost me $29.95. And that was Canadian dollars. How do they even make the box & packaging materials for that kind of money? Never mind ship the thing to Canada from …. oh, never mind, you know what I mean. It’s just a silly price. And if this thing stops me getting take-out … just once … it’s already paid for itself.

The first meal was an eye of round roast. I know, I know … mea culpa … but I’m surrounded by skinny people who like lean meat! Now for a guy who drives an induction stove, because it’s so fast, this thing was a just a little frustrating starting out. No action. Nothing. C’mon pot, give me some sizzle or something!

Nothing. Nada. Nil. Is it even working!?!

I’ll be eating steak tartare come evening time, won’t I?

Came home after work to one sweet-smelling kitchen. Or should I say savory! And to a lump of beef that was falling apart. Yet, the potatoes hadn’t turned to mush. How’d it do that!?! This is an interesting little pot. I think I’ll be spending some more time playing with the thing.

And when I’m done, I’ll talk more more about why a guy like me needs so many one-pot cooking devices. I sense a head to head coming up between the programmable multi-purpose pressure cooker, the air-fryer, & this new slow-cooker.

And we’ll see what it does to my waistline at the end of the month! 🙂

Eat More Fat!

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Eat More Fat!yougurt copy

With advice from just about all of our governments, certainly in the west, & our medical communities, we have spent several decades now trying to reduce our fat intake. During that time, I think we may even have achieved that goal, but western populations continued to get fatter. Higher fat diets, though now far more prevalent, are still considered unhealthy by the majority. You don’t need to go any further than the dairy case in the supermarket to see which philosophy is leading in the popular opinion stakes. The low & reduced fat milks predominate. Low fat & 0% fat yogurts occupy most of the shelf space. This, still current, reality was more harshly brought to my attention when I joined a couple of Facebook groups over the recent holiday. I joined some Instant Pot® communities so I could learn more about my new toy. Then I realized there were probably groups out there for my much older T-fal Actifry® too. There were!

In both communities, you’ll find that supermarket pattern mimicked. The tone of many comments suggest that eating low-fat is just a given thing. Obvious & matter of course. An indisputable & irrefutable fact that goes unquestioned. Many people are trying to avoid the fat. Indeed, the Actifry was designed for that very purpose. When I first opened my Actifry, I threw away the little green spoon that suggest that I limit my fat! On the Instant Pot® groups, I shared my yogurt success with the 10% fat cream. The silence was deafening! And as other conversations resumed, most went back to talking about low fat ingredients again. Though there were some using, almost with guilt, that positively decadent whole milk!

I find it very difficult to lose weight without adding fat to my diet. While I’m still struggling with getting back on track after the holidays, fat is still very much a favored part of my diet. I can only diet well when I up the fat intake. Eating a good diet, for me, means that I’m not putting on still more weight during times of stress. And fat is equally useful when I’m trying to lose weight. Why is fat so important?

Consider the mainstream dietary regimen of choice during past decades, the recommendations all centered around eating less and moving more. That basically means eat a low-fat, low-calorie diet. Fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrate, so it sounds like the obvious macronutrient to target. Protein is touted as the best macronutrient for satiety, so who needs fat? While all these are true, reducing fat in my diet has never worked well for me. Most often, it was because I couldn’t stick with the low-fat diet that remained.

Adding fat to my diet helps me stay the course better, & for longer. Will it get me to where I want to be? We’ll see.

Now I am not implying that I simply added a big dose of fat to the diet that was already making me fatter. Though even that might have helped displace some of the more truly fattening foods I was eating! The deadly combination, for me, is fat combined with sugar & processed starches. Though I can do a good job of gaining weight eating products advertised as low-fat, or zero-fat, too.

We’ll take a look at some of those fats that I consider good another time but for now, I’m off to enjoy some more of my 10% fat yogurt!

 

 

 

I Love Yogurt … Who Knew!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 3 Comments

I Love Yogurt … Who Knew!instant pot yogurt

I made my first batch of yogurt in my new Instant Pot® & it was so ridiculously good, I just can’t believe it! Check out the pic of that spoon standing upright in it. It is firm, with a really smooth texture, and it tastes so creamy that it’s hard to believe that it doesn’t contain any added flavouring. It is just the Natrel® 10%, with a couple of tablespoons of plain Balkan yougurt, a 6% fat version, as a starter. It may be the best yogurt I’ve ever tasted. I have taste-tested it with some skinny people, and even they like it!

This was done with what is known in Instant Pot® circles as the “No Boil” or “Cold Start” method of yogurt making. For this method apparently, the primary ingredient, the milk or cream, must be of the ultra-filtered or UHT pasteurised variety. Without boiling, the potential for bad bugs to flourish is higher in regular milks. The No Boil process, on the other hand, is the simplest thing I’ve ever done. Toss the milk in the pot. Add the couple of tablespoons of starter yogurt and blend this with the milk. Put the lid on & press the Yogurt button. The pot does its thing for 8 hours. You then remove the pot liner & stick it in the fridge to set. For this little effort, I just can’t believe the result.

Not everything has turned out so wonderfully well, on the first attempt, in my new pot. But this one is a winner. And, along with this yogurt being so good, it ticks many of the boxes I want ticked from a dietary standpoint too. It is deliciously higher in fat than most store bought versions. The 10% cream does have a few additives but I’ve regularly consumed far more processed products than this. Though I’m not lactose intolerant, it being lactose free should cut down a bit on the carb content. And it’s a very neat way to get some protein when you’re more in the mood for dessert than dinner. I’ll be adding some fruit & a little shaved dark chocolate to a big bowl of this for something positively decadent.

For taste, this outcome is a gourmand’s delight. Now I must see if I can replicate the amazing result, but with less expensive ingredients! Along the way, I will have to test drive the boil & cool method with regular milk (full fat, of course!) too.

Watch this space, I’m sure I’ll have some entertaining disasters to add to the list of Instant Pot® success stories along the way! 🙂

Natrel® is a registered trademark of Agropur, Instant Pot® is a trademark of Instant Brands Inc.

The Lazy Dieter

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 2 Comments

The Lazy Dieter

taco fries

Save Me From Myself!

You know how some skinny people stereotype us fat folk? We’re fat because we’re lazy, right? Now if I’m honest, I’d have to admit that I would rather lie than sit, and sit than stand. When it comes to getting anywhere, I’d probably drive around the block, rather than walk across the back yard. So are they right?

When I was younger, trimmer, and far fitter, I played sports. A lot. I liked soccer, handball, basketball, cycling, running and just about anything that got me out of the house. I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide to be lazy. Lazy came after I got fat!

Now there are some advantages to being lazy. A lazy person can get very creative when it comes to reducing workload. There’s an old industrial engineering saying about when you want to figure out the most efficient way to do anything, just give the job to the laziest person in the room! When it comes to dieting, there may be some advantages to laziness too.

While I love food, and I love the taste of food that I prepare at home, I not a big fan of the chores that surround cooking. I particularly despise cleanup. And it’s not easy to find willing volunteers to do the things I don’t like to do! There are two strategies that I use to help reduce the workload that surrounds the creation of my culinary masterpieces. The first thing I do is try to prepare the entire meal in a single pot or pan. The second thing is that I try to use the biggest pot I can find. I like having leftovers that save me cooking some future meals. Eating your own awesome fare, while not having to cook at all, is the best!

For the dieter, this carries another plus. Preparing a large batch of say, a curry or a chili, with good ingredients, allows us to have on hand, for immediate consumption, a healthy option that can win out over hitting the drive through. I guess the real reason I’m writing this post is to remind myself of this advantage! I’m feeling a little challenged at the moment and I need to curb my penchant for dashing out to the local eateries. I haven’t ordered pizza for delivery yet, so I guess I haven’t totally lost it! 🙂

While you can’t beat a big old fashioned frying pan, I also have a number of small appliances that pander to this one-pot cooking strategy. I’m enjoying playing around with my new Instant Pot at the moment. We’ll maybe take a look at the pros and cons of some of these gadgets down the road.

Meantime, if you’ve already broken your new year dietary resolutions, give the one-pot or one-pan strategy a try.

Just try to limit your ingredients to whole and real foods. I’m desperately trying to follow this advice myself at the moment!