time to cook -- or get off the pot

The deed is done.

I am no longer an Instant Pot virgin. And it did not take much to push me over the edge. Just a pot of beans.

Jennifer Rose, suspecting I was stalling, told me to get my Nike on and just do it. Her suggestion was simple and elegant. I needed to cook something easy to learn the concepts of my new machine.

She suggested the bag of black beans pictured in Thursday's post. 

Open up the package of black beans tonight, dumping half of them into a colander, stashing the remainder in the pantry.

Clean the beans. Sort through them to make sure there aren't some stones hidden. Even the packaged ones from the grocery store could harbor some foreign material hard enough to break a tooth on.

Put them in the Instant Pot liner, cover with water, and permit them to repose until you arise in the morning.

Once morning has broken, and you're up and around, drain the beans, rinsing them off, and return them to the Instant Pot liner, adding water until it reached 2" above the top of the beans.

Plug in the Instant Pot, hitting the "beans" button, and adjust the time to 23 minutes, high pressure. In less than a minute, the "on" light will appear, and you need to nothing.

When the cooking process has stopped, continue doing nothing, letting the pressure release naturally. When the pressure pin has dropped, you can then open it up to admire your handiwork. A pot of unflavored beans, an empty slate upon which to perform various feats of culinary magic. You don't need no stinkin' cut of animal to make your first pot of beans.

OK. That sounded easy enough. And it included enough concepts to get me started.

Because I am who I am, I had to do part of this my own way. It was late on Thursday night when I read Jennifer's comment. Rather than let another day go by without at least trying out my Instant Pot, I opened that bag of black beans (knowing I would need them later in the day for a pork dish), and performed an express soak.

I usually soak my beans that way. Beans and water go into a pot, I bring the water to boiling and set the pot aside for at least an hour. When I return, the beans are thoroughly soaked and ready for cooking.

As Jennifer suggested, I put the soaked beans in the liner, chose "beans" on the panel, dialed up 23 minutes at high pressure, and said "yes" when asked if I wanted to keep my beans warm after cooking. Jennifer had not mentioned that, but it seemed correct.

While the beans were cooking, I started preparing the day's soup and main course. I had scored a piece of summer sausage (Yup. The same meat your boss's wife would give you at Christmas and you felt compelled to serve it as an appetizer when they came to your Christmas party, even though you knew it had little flavor other than salt.) at Sam's Club when I was in Manzanillo. I developed the soup as a method for cooking elk sausage, usually provided by my ex-law partner. It is just vegetables with marjoram in a roux, but it is tricky to get the layers right.

The beans were going to be added to what started out as a chicken dish, but morphed into a pork rump combination that was basically Mexican with a heavy Asian influence.

While I was preparing the meat and vegetables on their respective cutting boards, I watched the Instant Pot as it built up pressure to begin the cooking cycle. That must have been about 20 minutes, even though I was not timing it. The beans then cooked for the allotted 23 minutes. The timer then tripped back to zero and started adding more time.

I thought the pot was just releasing its pressure. Thirty minutes passed and I was ready to start cooking everything else. But the timer was still ticking.

I took a closer look at the readout. And I immediately saw my first Instant Pot mistake. I did not want to keep the beans warm after they were cooked. I wanted to use them.

By that time, the pressure had been released. I opened the pot to discover perfectly cooked black beans.

I started wondering if my soup or pork dish could be cooked properly in the Instant Pot, and decided neither would work. Both dishes required constant tasting to ensure the layers were properly balanced. I do not know how that could work with the Instant Pot.

And the soup requires the addition of a roux before the sausage and potatoes are added to a browned vegetable combination. I suppose everything could be dumped in the Instant Pot at the beginning and the roux could be added after the pot de-pressurized. But it would not be the same soup.

As it turned out, today was a day for culinary mistakes. Not only did I waste time with the warming setting on the Instant Pot, the topping on my oven-baked pork dish was too dry (a healthy dose of Parmesan and extra sharp cheddar cheese could have fixed that), and because I could buy only purple cabbage for my soup the broth, which is usually clear, had taken on a somewhat muddy purple hue, as if it had just seeped out of a New Jersey chemical dump.

If I were grading, I would give myself a solid "C" for the day., But it is from failures that we learn.

My bottom like on the Instant Pot as a bean cooker is that it does what it is advertised to do. It took almost as long to cook my beans as my stove-top method does. But I did not need to pay the pot any heed while it cooked.

Rick had it right with Captain Renault. "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."