JAZ

I'm not sure about cream of mushroom soup, but I've developed a few Instant Pot recipes that use milk with no problem. I use milk and butter for cooking potatoes that are going to be mashed; and milk and water in oatmeal, mac and cheese, and tuna and noodles. I also have a recipe for pork loin in milk. In that recipe, the milk curdles a bit, but I call for pureeing the sauce with an immersion blender, so that takes care of the texture.

I found, when I was developing a recipe for Instant Pot stuffing, that an egg together with broth made for dressing that was more moist. It seemed to me that the consistency was more like stuffing that was cooked inside a turkey, which is what I was aiming for. Over the years, I've used several different recipes for dressing/stuffing; some use eggs, some don't.

I just saw this from the new editor and CEO: https://www.saveur.com/culture/print-is-back/. From the announcement: "Today, I’m so delighted to announce the pre-sale of our first new issue, which will drop in March of 2024—just in time for SAVEUR’s 30th anniversary. . . . This doesn’t mean we’re diving right back into printing monthlies. In starting from scratch, we had the opportunity to reconsider the old print model and land on one that will allow our publication to be the best possible version of itself, in 2024 and beyond."

I don't think anyone has mentioned TJ's grilled olives. My sister told me about them (we are both big olive fans) so I picked up a jar on my last visit. They're great -- very unusual, with an actual grilled flavor. Rather than a brine, they're packed in an oil-based liquid. I'd never heard of this variety of olive before, but in my opinion, they're a winner. This photo makes them look huge -- they are large, but the plate is a very small tapas plate.

I just saw this on Twitter. I thought it was a joke, but apparently it's real. There's a hilarious review of it there -- my favorite comment is about the green bean flavor: ". . .it is unforgivable. If you left a cup of green tea on the porch in bad weather for a week, during which time it attained sentience and promptly began plotting your demise, and you hate green tea, that’s what this tastes like. . . . Raw, unholy green in flavor as well as color, with a single, 1-note foghorn taste, like mowing the lawn with your mouth open."

Sorry I'm late to the conversation, but I developed a potato salad recipe with eggs and potatoes cooked at the same time for my book Instant Pot Obsession. (I can post it if anyone is interested.) Like@OlyveOyl, I cooked them for 4 minutes. In my case, I used smallish red potatoes quartered. To make the salad, I crushed the potatoes into smaller pieces.

In addition to the spinach and feta, we tried the steak and stout, chicken and bacon, and the chicken tikka masala. The steak and stout tasted great. The steak was cut into fairly big chunks so if you were truly trying to eat it out of hand, it would have been a mess. Since we were using forks and knives, it was fine. The chicken and bacon was a hit with both of us. We didn't make it to the chicken tikka masala for dinner (too full), so I had it for lunch the next day. The filling was excellent, but you're right, it was a little odd inside a crust. Although to be fair, since it was reheated, it probably wasn't at its best. The crust was pretty good. The pies are made with puff on the top and short crust on the bottom. The bottom crust was a bit thick and would have been better, I think, if we'd taken the pies out of their foil pie tins halfway through cooking so they could have gotten more crisp and browned.

For my birthday, my sister sent us a selection of savory hand pies from a place near us in Atlanta. This was the selection (not sure why the chicken and mushroom pie didn't get a fancy label): We chose four to bake a few nights ago for dinner. They recommend basting with an egg wash, so we did that. We only ended up sharing three that night, with one left over for lunch. I liked them all; Dave was not a big fan of the spinach and feta.

I love the combination of aged cheddar (or aged gouda) with roasted red peppers, so I can see that working quite well.

I was intrigued with the idea of fried saltines so I tried them, but topped mine with pimento cheese instead. Definite keeper.

We stayed in our place during our renovation, but a couple of things made this tolerable for us. First, we didn't change the location of any appliances or the sink, so there was minimal plumbing work. We had some electrical work done, but it was pretty minor and we were able to get that done ahead of time. The actual renovation involved a new floor, new cabinets and counters, and new appliances. Once the floor and cabinet bases went in, we set up a few pieces of plywood on a couple of the cabinet bases and cooked for a couple of weeks with an induction burner, Breville countertop oven, an Instant Pot, and a microwave (we moved the old fridge out into the hallway so we could still use it until the new one arrived). The main problem was the lack of a sink and dishwasher; we used a lot of disposable plates and utensils since we were doing dishes in the bathroom sink. As I recall, that stage lasted for about 2 weeks, so it wasn't terrible. Second, we didn't run into any big snags with anything major -- our appliances arrived and were installed on time, the countertops fit, etc. We had a lot of finishing work that didn't get done for months, but we could live with that.

The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product Interesting explanation from Atlantic magazine -- nothing that hasn't been said already, but a good recap: "A device developed primarily to address a particular food-prep inefficiency has a natural ceiling to its potential market, and when one catches on as quickly and widely as the Instant Pot, it can meet that market ceiling in pretty short order. . . . From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem."

A couple of cocktails in our usual evening rotation include orange twists (or, in non-cocktail terms, strips of the zest from oranges). Thus we regularly find ourselves with denuded oranges, which we sometimes struggle to use up. We use the supremed segments in a couple of salads and in a dish of roasted fennel and onions with Italian sausages, but we're always looking for new recipes that call for segments or lots of juice, or both. Anything interesting out there? Note that while we can usually eke out a little grated zest, recipes that are heavily dependent on zest are out.

In my experience, pretty much any canned diced tomatoes contain some pieces with skin. Some more than others, but I don't think it's unique to fire roasted tomatoes.

That is the thing with pressure cooking eggs, I've found. If you find a time and method that works, then do exactly that, with no changes, and you'll be fine. Change one thing -- amount of water, number of eggs, height of the rack, whatever -- and that's what seems to cause problems.