Fast meals.

Taking a break from bread  today to talk about 'fast meals.'

If you are like most Americans, cooking is not a priority.  We lead busy lives and, by time meal times arrive, we're feeling to wrung out to be able to do much other than sit in a restaurant and have someone take our order. We have a few quiet minutes before food arrives.  Then we eat, and pay the bill - wondering at the end of the month where all of our money has gone at the end of the month when we have nothing to show for it.  Restaurant bills aren't cheap.

We almost never eat out.  When I say 'almost never' I mean "less than five times per YEAR."  When you deal with multiple allergies such as my wife does, it is not easy to eat out.  Yes, a restaurant may be able to do a gluten free meal.  But when you are gluten fee, egg free, dairy free, and don't eat chicken or turkey, that is more of a challenge.  Cross contamination is very easy to happen too -- did that gluten free spaghetti sauce get stirred with a spoon that had flour on it?  How would you know, until you have an uncomfortable reaction to ingested gluten.

I'm not saying that all restaurants are careless - far from it.  But if you're very sensitive to numerous foods there is a limit to what a commercial kitchen can do.

We aren't independently wealthy and we don't have a chef who prepares our meals for us.  We also don't buy large quantities of pre-made gluten free food because of its cost and there are often other things in the items that my wife is allergic to,  such as soy.  The cost for me is the sticker shock  -- when you look at a SMALL box of gluten free crackers and they are over $5 you start asking yourself "how much do I really want these?" At the same time, convenience is nice.  If you get home and want (say) a beef stew, which normally takes 3 hours to cook, you're out of luck.

Actually, you aren't out of luck. Here is the solution we have found:  a pressure cooker.

Pressure cookers cook by sealing food inside an air tight vessel (the cooking pot), and, using heated steam, raising the internal pressure over that of the outside air.  At those temperatures water boils at a higher temperature than normal.  At seal level, and with an additional 15 pounds of pressure inside a pressure cooker, the steam temperature is about about 250F.

This doesn't sound like a really high temperature, since we cook in the oven at 350F, 450F, or even higher.  But steam has a lot of energy, and steam under pressure cooks MUCH faster than the dry heat inside the oven.

Here is an example:  To cook fresh broccoli, I used to steam it.  Typically it took 5 minutes or so to bring some water to boil, then the broccoli steamed for 15 minutes or so.  To cook broccoli in the pressure cooker, I place 1/4 cup of water in the pressure cooker, place the steaming rack into the cooker, add the broccoli, and seal it up.  It takes 2 minutes or so to bring that tiny amount of water to a boil and raise the steam pressure inside the cooker.  The broccoli cooks in 2.5-3 minutes from then, and you release the pressure, and serve.

20 minutes versus 5 minutes is a huge time savings.

For more information, the best reference I have found on pressure cookers is this one:
This book is not a set of recipes of the type 'Assemble the following ingredients. Place in pressure cooker. Cook.'  It is far better than that.  Instead, it gives you the tools to create your own recipes and cook the food you most want to eat.  There ARE many excellent recipes in it, but it is also loaded with timing charts and background information on pressure cooking.  It is the best book I have found, and Ms. Sass has several great blogs too, one of which can be found here: http://pressurecookingwithlornasass.wordpress.com/.

Pressure Perfect is a book for omnivores, though very useful to vegetarians.  I'm not a vegetarian but have also found this book invaluable: 
If you decide to take up pressure cooking, you have many choices for types of pressure cookers you can buy. Presto, a great American brand, makes stainless steel and aluminum pressure cookers, in various sizes, at a foundry in China.  [I have one of the old ones, when their foundry was still in Wisconsin, and have no experience with the new ones].  Here's a convenient link:


My favorite brand of pressure cookers is made by Kuhn Rikon. They are more expensive, but I decided to splurge. I have a personal issue about only buying USA or first world produced items, especially if they are going to touch food, and my old Presto wouldn't work on my current stove. [Note: new Presto cookers will work on electric smoothtop stoves.  My old one wouldn't.]  I elected to buy one of these:
As I have mentioned, we tend to use our pressure cooker daily, and sometimes more than once daily.  I'll even confess that I have more than one pressure cooker, and occasionally will use two or three simultaneously.

You can buy pressure cookers that go on your stove top, or ones that are electric and sit on a counter.

I'll talk about other quick gluten free recipes you can make in your pressure cooker in the near future.