Parsee Red Curry

This curry is adapted from the "Parsee Red Chicken Curry" recipe from 50 Great Curries Of India by Camellia Panjabi, for making in the Instant Pot. I have added vegetables and chickpeas to it to fill it out for use as a bulk cooking recipe for portioning out and freezing.

Lamb and Lentil Ragu

A delicious stew of lamb, lentils, and root vegetables cooked with tomatoes, red wine and herbs.

This goes well over pasta or polenta, and cooks fast enough in the pressure cooker to be doable on a week-night evening after work. 

If you don't have a pressure cooker, you can just dump all the ingredients in a slow cooker and let it cook for 8 hours.

Since this recipe makes enough for about 4-6 servings, I generally serve one third on the day, and divide the rest between tubs to freeze and eat later.

Broccoli and Stilton Soup

This is a tasty, creamy soup, full of green vegetableness, and subtly flavoured with stilton cheese. Even the blue-cheese-hating members of this household will eat it.

It is also very quick to cook up in the pressure cooker.

Bolognese Sauce in the Pressure Cooker

A weekday night mainstay. Pasta with Bolognese sauce.

Cooked in the pressure cooker, it is easy to quickly put together a big batch of the sauce, which can then be portioned out into tubs and frozen.

Minced beef is the traditional meat used, but minced pork also makes a good sauce.

Chicken Stock in the Pressure Cooker

After the Sunday roast chicken has been eaten, and the last of the meat has been pulled from the bones and lies boxed in the fridge, there is still one last meal to be squeezed from the carcass. It is time to make stock for soup.

Into the pressure cooker goes all that remains: skin, bones and cartilage. Add a quartered onion and a sliced carrot. A couple of stalks and seedy parts from green peppers. Four peppercorns, a good pinch of celery seed, a bay leaf or two.

Now pour in a couple of litres of water - enough to cover it all. Bring to the boil. Close the lid and bring up to high pressure. Let it hiss to itself over a low flame for an hour or so to leach the gelatinous proteins and minerals from the bones, to melt away the cartilaginous joint capsules into the water, to extract all the flavour possible from the last of the chicken.

When the hour is up, turn off the heat and let it stand and cool. When the pressure has released, strain through a sieve into a large bowl. Discard the solid remains, and put your stock into the fridge to chill. By the morning it will have jelled, ready to be made into soup.

Paprika Turkey in the Pressure Cooker

A weekday pressure-cooked stew of diced turkey thigh and potatoes in a rich tomato, paprika and soured cream sauce. All it needs is some green vegetables to accompany it.

Butternut Squash and Fava Bean soup, with a Morrocan twist

It's Friday, which means that it's time to invent something to use up whatever odds and ends there may be in the kitchen.

There's a butternut squash lurking from last week's veg box, and a tub of homemade stock in the freezer that needs using up, so it looks like we have a soup.

Now vegetable soup generally means some lentils or split peas to thicken and add protein. So an excuse to try the British-grown split Fava beans from Hodmedods that arrived in a Flavrbox. And then there's the tin of Ras el Hanout, that arrived that way too, ready to give a mild spiciness to it all...

Time to get out the pressure cooker.

Afelia, in the Pressure Cooker

Today's after-work throw-it-all-in-a-pan special is Afelia.

A Greek Cypriot dish in which chunks of pork and new potatoes are braised in a rich red wine and coriander gravy.

In the pressure cooker, it is ready in under half an hour.

Pressure Cooker Chilli con Carne

In the interests of completeness, here is my basic chilli recipe that I've been cooking on a regular basis for a very long time now. The presssure cooker shortens what would be a long slow simmer to a few minutes, making this doable for a work day evening meal without keeping everyone starving til after 8pm!