Now a member of a culinary cult

My wife has always wanted me to participate more in the kitchen.

              Bruce Wallace

She doesn’t exactly want me to be a trained chef, just do a little more consistent job of helping to get dinner on the table.

Or even an inconsistent job of getting dinner on the table. Anything.

Up to now, my efforts have included cooking anything possible on our grill, smoking a turkey, ribs or other meats and dishing out ice cream before I pitched in to do the dishes.

But cook?

Nah.

But this past month, Santa Claus brought the two of us an Instant Pot and my outlook on cooking will never be the same.

Surely you have heard about the Instant Pot?

The Canadian innovation is now one of the top-selling products on Amazon – in both Canada and the U.S. – and Ottawa-based inventor Robert Wang still says his Instant Pot stampede should continue into 2018.

This is no crock…..pot. But it looks like a crock pot with more computer settings than the space station.

What’s so great about the Instant Pot? I’ll leave it to Carole Nelson Brown, who is a chef who teaches Instant Pot cooking classes: “What’s not so great about the Instant Pot? This is healthier, cheaper and tastes amazing.”

She’s absolutely right.

The Instant Pot, a safe pressure cooker, came on the market seven years ago. “Our generation lives a different lifestyle, so we need to rethink those legacy devices and make sure they adapt,” Wang said.

The Instant Pot is fast and easy. It includes a “smart” device with multiple sensors to ensure the lid is sealed properly, that the pressure is perfect, and to guarantee food won’t burn.

Millions have been sold in the past two years and while my wife thought it was “just one more gadget to take up space in a kitchen cabinet,” I have put a delicious meal on the table more times since Christmas than in the previous three decades.

Needless to say, she’s nearly too stunned to eat.

My introduction to the Instant Pot came from social media and a few of the RV touring crowds I follow. The Instant Pot, besides being a very quick and easy way to cook, utilizes very low voltage. That means if we are in our rig out in national forest land, wild camping, we have to watch the amount of battery we are utilizing and low-voltage-cooking comes in handy.

But the first time I tried the Instant Pot, I knew it would mean more than just taking it in the camper.

While it looks like a crock pot, it cooks like a pressure cooker.

Now I can transform tough cuts of meat and dried beans into dinner in less than an hour.

Let’s face it, this is really the perfect combination of technology toy and device that gets my wife off my back about helping out in the kitchen.

It’s the ultimate set-it-and-forget-it device.

Instant Pot also promises the functionality of six other appliances – a slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, sauce pan, yogurt-maker and warmer. Of course, all I want it to do is crank out a pork loin. ribs, chili, etc.

Plus the instant pot gives you the buttons which make it easy to use – cooking a 2.5-lbs pork loin in 30 minutes – drop it in the Instant Pot and push “Pork” and watch your wife marvel at your cooking abilities.

I have fallen under the spell of the Instant Pot. I now follow their Facebook page, watch different YouTube videos – I have joined a culinary cult.