Instant Pot Cooking is Easy?

I have gone crazy, and I know this because I purchased an Instant Pot. It’s almost as bad as me buying a broom and intending to use it. 

Intentions and doing are entirely different. Intentions mean I may get around to it, and doing is actually starting and perhaps even finishing a project.

My intentions for the Instant Pot are good, noble, and perhaps will even be rewarded. I’m still working on the ‘doing’, or at least succeeding. 

Intimidated is how I would define by feelings when I unboxed my new appliance, so I asked a neighbor to help me get started with this new-fangled thing, or at least it is new and certainly fangled to me. 

So we embarked on testing my skills at baking a sweet potato. Let me first explain: this was the biggest, fattest, most rounded sweet potato I had ever seen. Most sweet potatoes I’ve encounter, admittedly my exposure to such has been more than limited, have been normal maybe 3 inches around at their girth. 

This one, however, was close to 6 or 7 inches around, looking somewhat like a small soccer ball; certainly larger than a baseball.

But, never to be discouraged, I pushed forward with gusto to have a wonderful sweet potato for dinner. Several hours later, I cut a tomato, halved an avocado, added cottage cheese and threw the hard as nails potato away and chowed down on my salad.

I marked my first attempt at instant pot success as a learner’s trial, and decided a few days later to cook a pot of pinto beans. They have now been ‘pressuring away’ for something like 3 hours and remain less than edible.

Okay, this is trial 2, and it hasn’t been a total winner, but I’ll cook them overnight and see if they might finally get done.

I’m back to reading the instructions laid out in steps 1-5. How hard could this be? I’ve cooked pinto beans on my stove a lot in my day. Of course, that day was some 40 years ago, but ….

What happened to those days when you could throw a couple of potatoes, a carrot, a bit of celery and a chicken thigh into a pan and boil it for awhile, and it turned out okay? 

Well, maybe I have Covid and my taste buds have deserted me so I can’t really taste the beans. I’ll ask my dentist what she thinks when I go in to see her about my broken tooth caused with I bit down on a pinto bean.

Yea, I love this Instant Pot.