Black Friday... in JULY?

So most of you, if not all of you know that a few weeks ago Amazon had their Prime Day. Some walked away with some pretty good deals. One of the biggest sellers was the Instant Pot. It is a 7 in 1 multi function cooker. You can purchase on Amazon.

Truth be told, I was definitely a bit hesitant. Reason being that I wasn't sure that I would really make good use of all 7 functions and I thought that I'd just have a one week phase with it and then stop using it. Plus my kitchen doesn't have a lot of room so it was just another appliance that I could do with out. In my research phase, I read up on a bunch of blogs and reviews - everyone had positive things to say and people seem to use this appliance regularly! So I decided to purchase the pot! It was supposed to arrive with free two day shipping but ended up getting it the next day which was a nice surprise.

Recently, I had been craving a simple chicken soup and figured I can use the pressure cooker function to cook it in a just a short period of time. It was a weeknight and I didnt have a lot of time to make a full on chicken stock/broth. I was able to make the soup in 60 minutes. Just enough time for me to work out at the gym!

The result? Better than I could have imagined!

In addition, I had so much stock left over, I thought, why not make some chicken congee in the SAME POT! So that's what I did. All I had to do was add rice, turn the pressure cooker back on and by the time I had gotten ready for bed, congee was the perfect consistency and delicious.

Below is the recipe and some photos - enjoy!

Soup: (can use pork ribs, carrots, daikon, etc)

2 corn, broken into thirds
2 organic chicken thighs - can use any part of the chicken as you wish
few slices of ginger
4-5 dried shiitake mushroom

1. soak mushroom in water - 20 minutes should be fine
2. fill up the instant pot with water to about the 6 mark
3. once mushrooms are soaked and roughtly sliced, pour the mushroom water in the pot
4. Add in all ingredients
5. Press the "soup" setting, it should default to high pressure (make sure the valve is sealed)
6. Set time for 45 min
7. Salt/season to taste

Congee:
Soup base/water/liquid of preference
Rice
Whatever else you want

1. Liquid to rice ratio is 7:1
2. Add in any other ingredients
3. Press the "Porridge" setting, it should default to high pressure (make sure the valve is sealed)
4. Set time for 60 minutes
5. Salt/Season to taste - add any toppings (scallions, thousand year old egg, cilantro, etc)