Tonight we contined our adventures with the instapot…this time trying to make chicken parmesan, using another of Melissa Clark’s recipes.  The ingredients were pretty simple: chicken breasts, garlic, mozarella, parmesan cheese, olive oil and tomato sauce.   (The only fresh mozarella we could find was fresh mozarella sticks so we chopped those up.)  We also started some water to cook pasta on the side.

First step was to slice the garlic and sautee it in olive oil (on the sautee function of the instapot) ( and this was probably the hardest part of the recipe!)

Next step was to add the tomato sauce and the thin sliced chicken breasts…we also added some grated parmesan on top, and used the pressure cooker function to fast cook the chicken:

After 5 minutes of pressure cooking, we manually released the steam, stirred the chicken and sprinkled with the fresh, chopped mozarella sticks (we also put some mozarella in our salad).  We just let the mozarella melt into the tomato sauce for a few minutes  (top on).

Finally, it was ready to serve (pasta ready too).  It was pretty good but we kind of missed the breadcrumb topping that usually accompanies chicken parmesan.  The good news was that the chicken was PERFECTLY cooked…super most and delicious.  We probably like Melissa’s  meatballs recipe better though (just being honest) but we will continue to experiment!

Tonight we had so much fun making spaghetti and meatballs in our equivalent of an InstaPot.  It was so much easier and faster than making normal spaghetti and meatballs and delicious as well. We followed a recipe we found in the New York Times by Melissa Clark (and took a few shortcuts because it was a school night (and Mom was working late).  The ingredients are simple: dried pasta, parmesan cheese, ground beef, mozarella cheese, panko bread crumbs, chopped garlic, one egg, and a bottle of good tomato sauce (or if you have time, you can make your own tomato sauce in the instapot thingy).

So the first step (if you are using bottled tomato sauce) is to make the meatballs: chop the garlic and then combine ground beef, chopped garlic, bread crumbs, parmesan cheese and one egg and form into balls a little bigger than one inch.  Don’t forget salt and pepper too.

The next step is to pour the tomato sauce in your InstaPot and then put uncooked spaghetti on top.  Then you drizzle olive oil on top of the spaghetti noodes and spread it around (so they don’t stick while they are cooking).  Finally add the meatballs and one cup water.

The you cover and cook on high pressure for 5 miuntes.  When that’s done, let the pressure out and stir to separate the spaghetti (if you have a plastic pasta fork, that’s the best thing).  Sprinke grated parmesan on top and let sit for 5 minutes and then add slices of fresh mozarella (Melissa Clark said ricotta but we decided mozarella would taste better) and let sit for another 5 minutes with the top loosely on.

Finally, serve it up on a nice plate and enjoy! (Add more cheese if you like!)

Happy New Years! One of our New Years resolutions was to post more.  (Believe it or not, we are cooking a lot, but we haven’t been very good about taking pictures and blogging about it….so we will try better.).  Las tnight we flew back to NY from San Francisco where we had a great time visiting friends and family (and eating very well…more on that later).  Mom ran to Trader Joes to get milk and a few vegetables but there was almost nothing left in the store for New Years Dinner, so we looked in our freezer and our fridge and we got lucky.  We found a frozen leg of lamb in the freezer and even better, from our wonderful house guests (thank you Jay, Jean and Camilla!) over the holiday break: fresh lemon, garlic and rosemary in the fridge.  So of course, we thawed the lamb, made a marinade of olive oil, lemon, garlic and rosemary and accompanied it with pearl cous cous (from the pantry) and a salad (thanks to mom’s late night run to Trader Joe’s). We finished up the meal with fancy brownies.   Here’s  the finished meal:

Here’s the ingredients and the first step:  making the marinade: we chopped the garlic and rosemary, slice the lemon and combined it with lemons.

Then we unrolled the leg of lamb and butterflied it a little more (so it was a flatter piece of meat that could absorb the marinade and also cook faster).  Then we put it skin side up in the marinade

Meanwhile while the lamb was marinading, we sauteed the pearl couscous (otherwise it sometimes gets a little soggy.)  Once it was a deep brown, we added chicken stock and let it slowly simmer.

After the lamb had marinade 3/4 hour on one side, we flipped it to the other for 1/4 hour.  Then we put in on a high grill to get a good sear.

Then we finished it in the oven (and for serving sliced it up into smaller pieces).  We served it with our yummy pearl cous couc:

For dessert, we made our famous brownies (just butter, chocolate, eggs, sugar and a little bit of flour) but fancied them up with whipped cream and raspberries.

Final version, with final plating (sorry we missed the crumbs by the brownie…)!