The Instant Pot = Your Instant Dinner (or Breakfast, or Lunch)!

Do you struggle to eat healthy meals, in part because you're working long hours? 

My gamechanger of the year is the Instant Pot

With this lovely counter-top device, I can grab a frozen organic chicken breast from the freezer and have it on the table ready to serve 30 minutes later. I can turn dried black beans into delicious Brazilian black beans in about the same time. And in fewer than ten minutes, I can turn a dozen eggs into perfectly cooked, easy to peel hardboiled eggs to add to my family's lunchbags all week long.

The Instant Pot is the great for working moms (and all working people) getting home from a long day with no food prepared for dinner. This appliance is a wonderful way to cook very wholesome ingredients in very little time. The flavors of food cooked in the Instant Pot, especially when you are combining ingredients, are divine!

Depending on the culture of your organization and your kitchen space at work, you could also use the Instant Pot at work. Because the Instant Pot plugs into the wall and doesn't make a lot of noise nor put off much heat, it could be a great addition to your workplace. 

I could see this setup working really well if you had an Instant Pot set up in the lunchroom, and you had a routine of prepping ingredients at home. When you need to eat at work, you could just throw everything into the Instant Pot, turn it on, walk away and come back when it's ready. Because most Instant Pot recipes call for high pressure cooking with the pot sealed up tight, there's no need (or ability) for you to stand there stirring the pot. 

Generally, pressure cookers can be super-intimidating, but the Instant Pot has a lot of safety features and isn't too hard to learn how to use. 

You can make many yummy things with your Instant Pot. One common use of the Instant Pot is for making rice. I happen to already own a rice cooker, so I haven't used it for rice yet.  Same goes for yogurt -- you can use it to make yogurt, but because I also own a yogurt maker (eeek, maybe I have a kitchen gadget problem), I haven't used it for that either. My brother uses his Instant Pot to make dog food for his sweet Lab. Many others use it to make bone broths. 

As the top review on Amazon says, "I didn't fully appreciate, until several days in, just how amazing this aspect of the Instant Pot is: you can start something cooking in it, and then *walk away* - even leave the house, and it will finish cooking just like you instructed, and be *perfectly done*, and then it will *keep it warm for up to 10 hours*! Not keep cooking it, just *keep it warm*. For up to 10 hours! You can put something in there in the morning, leave for the day, and come back to a perfectly cooked whatever, just waiting for you! Booyah!"

Some of my go-to recipes to get you started: 

- Hardboiled eggs

- Brazilian black beans

- Lentil and spinach soup 

- Vietnamese chicken pho (amazing and not hard to make, but requires a lot of ingredients! You can do it!) 

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