No pressure supper
Pressure cooker workshop hopes to encourage more family dinners
Hoping to encourage and enable more family dinners, the North Dakota State University Extension and the Barnes County Public Library have joined forces to take pressure off the family chef – with the help of multi-pressure cookers.
Sue Milender, family and community wellness extension agent for Barnes County, hosted the first of six free-to-attend classes on how to cook with a pressure cooker Tuesday, using the Instapot brand model, though she said there are plenty of other brands that are just as good. Pressure cookers have a range of features and prices, but Milender said you could probably expect to spend $60 on one.
“Once you buy that, when you’re not going to McDonalds and you’re making food at home and you have this much leftover, (it makes up for the price),” Milender said. “It’s really fun to make (meals) in the Instapot. It’s easy.”
The advantage? The pressure cooker enables highly simplified cooking. From sauteing to steaming to preparing whole dishes in just one place, the pressure cooker works rapidly to produce fully cooked meals in very little time. Milender demonstrated how to prepare spaghetti & meatballs in just 15 minutes.
“What I would do is, I would pour my olive oil in, saute my ground beef and then I would top it with my spaghetti and the sauce and the seasonings,” Milender said. “They call it the ‘one-pot.’”
The class isn’t sponsored by Instapot. Rather, Milender said, the goal of NDSU extension was to help encourage families to eat together. Citing the importance of regular family dinners to the healthy growth of
children, Milender said she hopes that tools like the pressure cooker helped families with ever-busy lives find the time to gather for a meal.
There’s a considerable variety of dishes that can be cooked with a pressure cooker, with Milender saying that it’s really only bad at cooking anything that benefits from dryness – like trying for crispy chicken nuggets. You also can’t use it as a deepfryer. However, there’s a lot of different things you can cook with one, most of which are already pre-programmed into the device’s settings. From steaming rice to baking bread, the pressure cooker’s versatility allowed Milender to serve spaghetti and meatballs and slices of cheesecake – both of which were cooked using the same device.
“Once you buy that, when you’re not going to McDonalds and you’re making food at home and you have this much leftover, (it makes up for the price),” Milender said. “It’s really fun to make (meals) in the Instapot. It’s easy.”
The next class is scheduled for January 25 at 4:30 p.m. The classes are held in the basement of the Barnes County Courthouse. Future classes will be held on Feb. 8 and 22 and Mar. 8 and 29. Additionally, NDSU is also putting on a teen baking class at the same location on Jan. 18, Feb. 15, Mar. 22 and April 19.