This is the story of how a Chinese man changed my frugal living life with a simple kitchen tool.
No, I don’t mean by bestowing upon me some ancient Chinese proverb about mindfulness or healthy living.
This Chinese man changed my life by taking an old-style kitchen tool and bringing it into the twenty-first century.
He invented the digital electronic pressure cooker.
Pressure cookers have been around forever. I can remember the periodic rattle of the venting like it was yesterday.
Cooking with the old-fashioned pressure cookers was part art and part science. A weighted ball sat perched on top of the vent opening. Different positions of the weighted ball meant the various pressures inside.
Cooking times, heat, and pressure had to be matched perfectly, so the contents of the pot neither ended up ‘not quite done’ nor baby food, a delightfully blended pile of mush you ate when the art and science didn’t quite work out.
My stepfather was a deer hunter. The signature of a meal of deer meat is tough and dry.
Mom used her old aluminum pressure cooker and a little magic to save the family from the torture of dry and tough dinners.
The problem with the way that old-fashioned pressure cookers worked is it seemed to take a long time. I remember listening to that ball chatter for better than an hour before we started to eat. Thanks to the power of the internet and the Chinese guy working in his garage to change the way we pressure cook food.
The second tool that changed my life?
A vacuum sealing system I use not only breaks apart things I buy in bulk but keeps leftovers fresh longer, so you never have to finish the 35 gallons of chili all in the same week.
Let me give you some ideas about how I use these together to save me a bunch of money, but also make some damn tasty dishes.
Use the power of the internet to find only the successes.
I love using the internet to find recipes. My favorites are by celebrity chefs on the food channel. These are 90% wins for me, hardly ever a failure.
I do the same thing when looking for Instant Pot meals. The Instant Pot has been around long enough that many of the top recipes on the internet are not fails.
Cooking times, pressure settings, and whether it should be natural pressure release or manual have been figured out and well documented.
Do I want to hard-boil some eggs? Do a Google search, and the top result tells me to cook on high for five minutes, allow for five minutes’ natural pressure release then, manual release after that.
Many people have already done the experimentation and delivered the results for most of the dishes out there.
One word of caution is to understand how the instant pot works and to follow the recipes carefully.
I followed a recipe for Spanish rice once, and it was an epic failure. After retracing what I did, I found I screwed up when I increased the quantity. My water-to-rice ratio was off. I doubled the amount of tomato sauce and added too much rice. The project turned into a starchy clumpy mess that stuck to the sides of the container. It was an epic fail that took me a long time to scrub away.
Recipes work if you follow them.
Buy in bulk or manage your garden leftovers.
Every year my garden produces too many tomatoes. There is usually an end-of-season pick to get them all inside to avoid the first frost. It’s like a mad scramble fire drill.
I probably should start a little before, but for some reason, it always does end up chaotic.
Every year I have tomatoes covering every inch of my counter space.
Now the decision turns to what to do with them all. Before my food saver, I’d make salsa or spaghetti sauce and freeze them in Glad Ware containers. The problem was freshness.
When I broke out one of the containers over the winter, it tasted terrible. I don’t think it spoiled, but it didn’t have that ultra-fresh flavor I liked.
For last year’s harvest, I used my food saver. Over the winter and even into the summer, they still had a great taste.
I found I had to follow a little different procedure when freezing to make sure everything turned out.
The problem with the food saver is it’s almost impossible to get a good seal when doing liquids. The liquid interferes with the heat sealer, and the bag won’t ever seal all the way.
What I did was freeze the salsa in one of the Glad Ware containers first, so they became like a brick. Then I transferred it to the bag and sealed it while it was still frozen.
I did try to freeze whole tomatoes, but this didn’t work out well either. The vacuum squished the tomatoes into a lump. Some of the juice leaked out, and the seal wasn’t perfect. These ended up getting a little freezer burn, and I threw them out.
Cooking times are often cut in half.
The one thing that really drew me to the instant pot was watching some of the videos on YouTube about one-pot meals.
You can essentially make one pot of spaghetti and have it ready from start to done in like 10 minutes. You dump all the ingredients into one pot and it all gets done together. No need to do the noodles separate from the sauce anymore.
You can come home from work, dump everything in the pot, and be eating in something like 10 minutes or so.
Do you know how a good bowl of well-brewed chili would need to cook for hours? With the instant pot, you can cut hours of flavor melting into about a half hour.
It’s crazy how well and how quickly the power of pressure can cook meals.
No longer do we only use them to cook the tough cuts of wild meat.
Use the mason jars to vacuum and store soups and liquids.
The problem with vacuum sealing liquids is, you either need to freeze them first or you need to seal them in something where the liquid doesn’t interfere with the sealing process.
I use mason jars. You can get a special mason jar sealing attachment to use on either the wide-mouth or narrow mason jars. I like the wide-mouth version. If you ever need to fish ingredients out with a fork or a spoon at least the mouth of the jar will make it much easier.
Recently I switched over from freezing and bagging my chili, soups, and spaghetti sauces to just using mason jars. I have not yet frozen them in the Mason Jars. I refrigerate them only and they seem to last for a while.
Food saver recommends using straight wide-mouth mason jars if you choose to freeze them. I think it has to do with the thickness of the glass as it transitions to the screw on top. Ball makes special jars just for freezing, but I don’t have them.
Easily make your own broths and BBQ.
Do you love making your own vegetable broths? Something nice and healthy rather than that sodium-laden grocery store-bought crap. The instant pot is perfect.
Save up all your vegetable scraps add a little seasoning and let it go. When it’s all done, strain out the vegetable parts and pour the broth into mason jars; hook up the Food Saver and seal it up.
It’s really that easy.
I’m more of a big project type of cook and even make my own vegetable broth now.
One thing I’ve always wanted to try but haven’t gotten around to is what I call the all-year BBQ.
I love doing wood-fired BBQ in the middle of summer, but in the winter, it’s a pain to get it right because of the cold or snow.
The first part I’ve done before. That is marinating the meat. The Food Saver has marinating dishes you can buy. These can be a little expensive, so I have a little hack I learned over the internet. What you want to do is get a bag large enough to accept your meat and the marinade.
Fill your kitchen sink with water. Make sure that you leave enough room there so the sink doesn’t overflow when you insert the meat.
I’ve done this with zipper lock bags and it works really well.
Insert the bag with the meat and marinade until the water is all the way to the zipper on the bag.
The weight of the water will push on the sides of the bag and drive out all the air.
Zipper the bag and set it aside for however long you want to marinade.
Then after you are all done BBQing, you can portion the meat into meal-size bags. Vacuum them up, and store them for however long you’d like. The sauce should be thick enough to seal without having water problems with the sealing portion.
I keep experimenting with my instant pot and food saver. The food-saver bags can get expensive so I’m moving more of my sealing habits over to mason jars. Mason jars are cheap.
The lids usually last up to about six sealings before they get too warped and need to be replaced. Even then, a box of jar lids is pretty cheap.
I’ve altered the way I cook so much around the Instant Pot and Food Saver, I really don’t want to go without them. It’s like trying to live without a microwave now. I remember the pre-microwave days and I never want to relive those.
I’m actually about to make some chili in my Instant Pot for dinner tonight.
Be safe,
Kevin