Shmookitty wrote:My husband and I budget for each of us to spend $60 a month on whatever we want. It usually involves Amazon. He usually gets Kindle books and I have been ordering grains and other McDougally treats.
He is making noise about wanting a 7 in 1 Instant Pot. I've heard that most of the vegan recipes for the IP are soups, and I don't really eat soups, so I am doing some research into what else I can make in there. I buy canned or boxed low-sodium beans, I don't cook from dried, and I am totally fine batch cooking grains on the stovetop. I wouldn't make my own yogurt and I don't have a need for a slow cooker. He'll have to do more convincing to make me want to shell out the money for one. Besides, we have a tiny kitchen in a rented townhouse - where would we put it?!
Good morning from toasty central Florida!
One comment for Annette before I forget...... look in the international foods aisle of the grocery store for farro. The one I find most often is Nature's Earthly Choice, in a green package. Bob's Red Mill also carries it, but I find their prices to be a bit higher on some things. It seems that all I've ever purchased has been imported from Italy, perhaps it's not grown here. I've even gotten it at Walmart sometimes.
Okay, the Instant Pot. I'm not familiar with the 7 in 1 your husband wants, I don't even know if that's what ours is. It's my husband's toy, which I don't at all mind!
For us, as we live in a small space, an RV, where our kitchen, living and dining rooms are all one, heat and moisture generated by cooking matters a great deal. Want potatoes for potato salad when it's hot, excellent in the IP. Ditto farro for a summer salad. Other grains can be batch cooked in it as well, and although I've seen quinoa cooked in it, that makes absolutely no sense to me, as it's positively easy and quick on the stove. He also cooks beans from scratch in it when he's making a large batch of chili (on the stove). A bag of dried beans, which makes about four can's worth, costs about what a single can does, and I just freeze whatever is left. He loves doing chickpeas for hummus in the IP, as that's a long cooking one on the stove. We have a fondness for borlotti beans, aka cranberry or Romano (that's the Goya label), which are only very rarely found in cans here. He also loves batch cooking lentils for dals, that's his newest experiment. I make most soups on the stove, call me old fashioned, but after experiencing minestrone mix in a farmers market in Rome, he loves to make minestrone in the IP, although he does boil the pasta separately. He wants to learn to make mujadara (multiple spellings) and red beans and rice in it. He's played with a recipe for an Indian rice, lentils and vegetable dish called kitchari (multiple spellings, multiple recipes), basing that on something he found online then tinkered with. Just a few ideas to answer your questions.
An added benefit is that you can set it to do whatever, and it doesn't need to be minded, doesn't need to be stirred, freeing you to do other things while it does its thing.
None of our small appliances are stored in the kitchen, they're in a cupboard in the bedroom. Gotta think outside of the box when you live in a small space!
There may very well be sales during the holiday shopping season that could make it work with your budget. I even saw it for sale one time at the grocery store down here, not a place I would have expected to sell that!
If you live near a restaurant supply store that sells to the public, go there and look for a (cross-cut) fine mesh strainer. We got ours at one a long time ago. It holds a cup of dried whatever for rinsing, and is excellent for the small stuff like quinoa. DH bought us a lightweight plastic one online several years ago for our international travels, which is very nice as rental kitchens are all too often very poorly provisioned with respect to cookware.
Hopefully that answers some of your questions and gives you some things to discuss with your husband. By the way, there are countless discussions about the IP in the food and recipes section for more ideas and comments.
