Pressure cooking dinner

If you own a pressure cooker or even a pressure canner, you can cook just about your whole meal in that one pot and have a meal done in under 30 minutes.

I have an old 8 quart Mirro pressure canner. It’s not suitable for canning projects as it does not meet all requirements to be a pressure canner since it's not the tested 16 quart required by NCHFP. But my favorite thing to really do with it is prepare food for meals, just like I did tonight.

Our menu consisted of barbecue pork (from pork I canned a couple of weeks ago), fresh whole green beans, red skin potatoes, fried squash, and bread and butter along with some fresh tomatoes cut into wedges. So, what role did the pressure canner play? I cooked the green beans, potatoes, and the barbecue pork in it, all together.

In the bottom, I placed the green beans with some onion, a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce, and about a half tablespoon of sorghum molasses and the broth drained from the home canned pork. I added about a cup or two of water to that.

On top of the green beans, I put some unpeeled, cut up red skin potatoes in a small aluminum loaf pan.

In the jar of home canned pork, I put a few tablespoons of good barbecue sauce and about a teaspoon and a half of adobo sauce with one of the chili peppers. I snuggled the jar of pork next to the pan of potatoes, letting it rest on the green beans in the bottom so it didn’t have direct contact with the bottom of the pan.

I put the lid on the pressure canner and put the weight on 15 pounds, started the heat, and let that all cook for about 10 minutes after it came up to pressure.

While that was cooking, I prepped some fresh yellow squash and got it started frying with cornmeal, some flour, salt and pepper.

In the time it took me to fry the squash, the cooker got finished and I let it depressurize and cool a bit before taking the weight off. (In canning, I would have let it fully depressurize and cool, but for cooking you can safely remove the weight and let the pressurized steam be released.)

The squash turned out beautiful and delicious.

Dinner was put on the table and onto our plates, where we really over-ate on all this yumminess!

Since we’re off grid now (the fan you see in a picture above runs from the generator on especially hot days or to draw cooking heat out of the cabin), saving cooking fuel of any kind is very important. A pressure cooker is so versatile and useful for saving fuel and preparing delicious, homemade meals!