One-pot Instant Pot beef and pasta

I love my electric pressure cooker. My off brand not quite an "Instant Pot" is my go-to device for cooking an easy and simple dinner. I've been writing these up as recipes lately, so I can easily find them later, and today, I'll share with you this one: How to make pasta and ground meat in the instant pot.

You'll need:

• One pound fresh ground beef, chicken or turkey. I often use ground chicken, because it's often on sale where I live, as low as $3.99 a pound. Sometimes even less.
• A jar of pasta sauce, typical size is 24 ounces.
• Dried noodles. Nothing special here, I just buy whatever medium-sized pasta is on sale, usually rotini or penne. I usually use about 8 ounces, or about half a typical box.
• 1.5 cups of broth or water. I mostly use water and tend to save broth for soups and stews.

First, sauté the meat in the instant pot. Brown the meat, it's easy. Chunk it up as you go. I have what I call the "meat asterisk," a meat masher or ground meat chopper. You should get one, they're cheap. I got mine at Aldi for $3, but Dollar Tree has even cheaper ones. It is perfect for breaking up the fresh ground meat block into little blobs.

(If you want to get fancy, you can add italian spices at this point, or even a bit of diced onion. I keep diced onion in the freezer so that I can grab a handful of it in a pinch and add it to whatever I'm making.)

Next, turn off sauté mode and pour in the water. Add the pasta noodles and gently push them so they're mostly in the water. Add the sauce over the top. Try to cover it all with sauce. Don't stir anything at all.

Set the pressure cooker to cook for five minutes on high. Which really means, it'll take 15-20 minutes to come up to pressure, then it will pressure cook for 5 minutes, then it will take 15-25 minutes to come back down from pressure and then you can eat dinner. So I try to set the cooker up an hour before I want to have dinner, and after it's done cooking, it goes into "keep warm" mode automatically, so dinner will be warm and ready whenever I happen to wander back into the kitchen after it's done.

That's all there is to it. Just the maybe 10 minutes of prep, if you're browning ground beef (chicken or turkey browns faster), and that's it. It's more than enough food for two people, with ample leftovers for tomorrow's lunch. Or you could portion it up into zip bags or containers to freeze some of it for later re-heating.

The pasta will be soft, but that's okay with me.

Enjoy!

Quick and Incomplete Notes on Low Salt Food

I've had to change my diet recently after learning that I have a heart condition. It's not possible to completely eliminate salt (unless I want to only eat rocks), so I'm not going to be able to get to a zero sodium diet, but I have decided to eliminate sodium from my diet wherever I can. Here's a few of my notes on what I look for when buying food.

HOWTO: Cook shrimp in an air fryer

We recently got a cool new toy, something that I've wanted for a very long time: An air fryer!

What does an air fryer do? It doesn't actually fry. It is a convection oven that uses forced hot air to cook things quickly. These "air fryers" are meant to be used sort of like deep fryers; they're good for things like fries, potatoes, chicken wings, breaded shrimp, and other snacky things that you would cook in a deep fryer, if you had one. Well, I don't want a real deep fryer, because all that oil is bad for you, and it makes your home smell like a Burger King. So I've been wanting one of these things for a while. When I first started looking these up a couple years ago, I saw that that Philips was selling them for $200 -- just too expensive for me. I started looking again recently and saw that there are now some other well-reviewed ones from other brands for under $100. I ended up buying this GoWISE USA GW22639 3.7-Quart Programmable Air Fryer on Amazon for about $62. It was list price for somewhere around $70 or $80, so I ended up buying a used one (a returned one, I think) for $65, then I got an extra five percent off thanks to our Amazon card.

Slow Cooker/Crock Pot Recipes

Here are links to a few slow cooker recipes I've liked and saved:

• Chicken and Lentils in the Crock Pot
• Salsa Chicken in the Crock Pot
• World's Easiest Vegan Chili

World's Easiest Vegan Chili

Before Cooking

Fake meat chili in the slow cooker? Super easy. We eat meat, but occasionally buy meat substitutes, and they're usually packaged in a way where you can keep it in the freezer until you need it. This takes under 10 minutes to prepare, and you spend most of that time dicing an onion.

Ingredients:

• 1 can mild chili beans in mild chili sauce, 14.5 ounces
• 1 can black beans, 14.5 ounces
• 1 can diced tomatoes, 14.5 ounces
• 1 package fake meat grounds (11 oz. in our case)
• Your favorite onion (we had a big ole' white onion)
• Chili seasoning packet (Aldi's Stonemill Original Chili Seasoning Mix)

The fake meat doesn't really matter; just get one that looks like crumbled ground beef and comes in a package of somewhere around or just under a pound. I see both 11 ounce and 14 ounce packages. I bought these "Beyond Beef" grounds on a whim at our local Target. Everything else came from Aldi, my favorite grocery store. You don't have to buy "chili" beans, either. Almost any kind of beans will work.

To prepare, all you need to do is:

• Dice the onion.
• Open the two cans of beans and can of diced tomatoes. Drain them, but do not strain them. Meaning, hold the lid down and turn the cans upside down, draining most, but not all of the liquid into the sink. (If you don't do this, the chili comes out watery.)
• Throw the onion, frozen fake meat crumbles, beans and diced tomatoes into the crock pot.
• Add the chili seasoning packet.
• Stir everything together.
• Set the slow cooker for at least eight hours on low.

Then when dinner time rolls around, you've got delicious chili that tastes pretty good.

If you hate animals, you can add sour cream and shredded cheese to taste.

Minneapolis Roundup

Looking for something to do in Minneapolis? Here's a quick bullet list of a few fun places to check out.

Need good restaurant recommendations? Here's a few. Or if you're more into the fast food/fast casual (read: cheaper) kind of thing, here's a list of five less upscale places to consider.

Back in 2013, some random hack tried to expense a quick trip to the Twin Cities by pounding out an awful travelogue of his weekend's mis-adventure in the area. Here find my suggested alternative itinerary for how to spend a weekend in the Twin Cities.

Interesting Fast Food in Minneapolis

I'm putting together a list of interesting fast food/fast casual restaurants in Minneapolis for a friend. Got one to add? Leave it in comments.

Minneapolis has a few local (or at least "not available in Chicago") restaurant chains that are worth checking out. Here's my favorites:

1. D'Amico & Sons, multiple locations, including 22nd and Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis. Fantastic pasta salads. Great little pizzas. Great sandwiches. You can get a bottomless glass of wine when you dine in. I go here for pasta salad every time I'm in town.
2. Punch Pizza, multiple locations. Neapolitan Pizza in 90 seconds. It's sort of Chipotle for individual pizzas. Pick what you want, they cook it in the big oven, and yum.
3. Brasa. Northeast Minneapolis. It's meat. Rotisserie-cooked meat. A friend introduced us to this place last year. Everything is simply cooked and quite good.
4. Pizza Luce. Multiple locations including downtown Minneapolis. Gourmet pizza. My favorite pizza place on earth. Try the baked potato pizza. Has a ton of vegetarian and vegan options, including vegan fake cheese. They will deliver to downtown hotels, great option if you're tired after a long day of convention going.
5. Lee Ann Chin. Multiple locations. Minnesota's own asian restaurant chain. My wife says their food is "objectively terrible," but it's very much comfort food for me, with Chinese food that is at least the same every time and typically better fare than from most of the crappy Chinese places here in Chicago. Also, cream cheese wontons are better than crab rangoon!

Stay tuned for better restaurants and other stuff in another post.

Chicken and Lentils in the Crock Pot

Here's another easy crock pot recipe. I adapted it from this recipe, changing things up a bit to make things easier, because I'm really lazy.

• About 1.5 pounds of chicken. I think we had closer to 1.7. Go as cheap as you can stand. Any meat ends up moist and delicious after 8+ hours in the crock pot. I think we used Aldi chicken breast tenders. Good meat, but you end up spending some time cutting out some veins.
• About 8 ounces (half a bag) of brown lentils.
• Some garlic. I used only 2-3 cloves, because I'm not a huge fan of super-garlicky flavor.
• Chicken broth. We ended up using nearly four cups, instead of the original recipe's two cups, otherwise we couldn't cover the lentils properly. That was fine; the lentils suck up the broth like a sponge, this won't be too soupy.
• An onion.
• Spices: Paprika, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin and coriander. A little salt and pepper can't hurt, either. I used smoked paprika because that's all we had, and it worked fine.

Prep was very easy.

First, peel the gross parts off of the onion, then slice it up into small pieces. I ended up using about two thirds of it; I was a little worried that if I used the whole thing, this would taste like nothing but onions. Line the bottom of the crock pot with the onion bits. Dice the garlic and throw it on top of that.

The Food.com recipe says put the chicken down next, then put the lentils on top. But don't do that -- that almost sank us. There wasn't enough broth to cover the lentils and that's why we ended up adding so much more broth.

Put down some spices (2 teaspoons paprika, a teaspoon each of cinnamon, turmeric, cumin and coriander).

Clean the lentils. To clean them, rinse them in a strainer. Eyeball them to look for any stones or dirt or gross ones, and pull them out. Mine were fine, there was nothing to pull out. Add the lentils to the crock pot.

Clean and cut up the chicken however you want. I cut it up into big chunks, so it could move around easily when I stirred the mixture later. Throw the chicken in on top of the lentils.

Add some more spices on top of the chicken -- exactly the same amount as before (2 teaspoons paprika, a teaspoon each of cinnamon, turmeric, cumin and coriander). This is about double what the Food.com recipe suggests. Other readers suggested that you do this, to make the dish less bland. It really helps.

Add in your chicken broth. Are you adding two cups, or four cups? Up to you, but make sure the lentils are well covered and that the chicken's at least a bit into the broth. Me, I'd probably cover it all with broth.

Close up the crock put, put the thing on low, and let it cook for 8-10 hours. After seven hours, we were a little worried that the lentils were underdone (because we put them on top, instead of under the chicken), so I put it up to high for the last couple of hours. I stirred it every few hours, then toward the end we'd taste a lentil or two to see how soft the lentils were.

That's all there is to it. We served ours over white rice, cooked in the rice cooker with broth instead of water. It was delicious, and it served four people amply. It could have probably served five. And this turned out to be much easier than the original recipe -- no need to brown the chicken ahead of time or use corn starch.

Salsa Chicken in the Crock Pot

I've been cooking a lot more lately, trying to slow down spending on meals out. I still shop at Dollar Tree, but I've also broadened my horizons where I can. (I'll need to do a separate post on Aldi soon!) Reddit has some great discussion boards (subreddits) on both budgeting and cooking: /r/frugal/, /r/budgetfood, and /r/slowcooking.

The Slow Cooking subreddit turned me on to Salsa Chicken. This was super easy to cook in the crock pot, and I'd highly recommend it.

All you need is:

• A couple of chicken breasts. (I defrosted a couple of huge ones we bought at Jewel when chicken was on sale for $1.99/pound.)
• A jar of salsa. (That would be Dollar Tree's finest $1 medium chunky salsa, thank you very much.)
• A packet of taco seasoning. (How much? Don't remember. Probably $.79 from Family Dollar.) 
• Peppers. (I bought a bag of little sweet peppers at Aldi for $1.49. They aren't always very good; I should have just bought a couple of big red peppers. A few of these little ones were crappy and I threw them out. The others worked out okay, though.)
• Geen onion. (I only had dehydrated onion bits handy, so a neighbor came up with some green onions for me to chop up and add to the mix.)
• Can of black beans. (I was worried that a whole can would be too much, but it worked out fine. I strained the beans before adding them. $1 at Dollar Tree.)
• Can of sweet corn. (I was also worried that a whole can would be too much, but it was fine. I strained these as well. Nobody wants to drink corn juice. $.79 from Dollar Tree or Family Dollar, I forget which.)
• Whole large tomato, diced. (I had a tomato left over from checking out the new Trader Joe's by our house. It was $.79. I actually felt TJ's produce was kind of beat up. I'm glad I checked it out, but I probably won't be buying produce there again.)

I sliced the chicken into 1/2 inch or one inch slices or so. Then I just mixed everything up in the crock pot, and made sure the chicken was mostly covered. I cooked it in the crock pot, on low, for about nine and a half hours. This came out fantastically well. You didn't even need a knife to cut the chicken. We ate this with tortilla chips.

Not counting the chips or green onions, this cost under $8 to make a huge dinner for two, with leftovers. We could have comfortably fed one or two more people. And you don't have to add peppers or seasoning. If you only have corn or beans (and not both), you could have just added one. I also didn't need to add the extra tomato, was just using up what I had around.

Big Fat Bacon!

Damn, maybe I'm regretting moving away from Minnesota. I'm missing out on the opportunity to eat 1/3 pound slice of bacon fried and carmelized with maple syrup, served on a stick with dipping sauces. (Image Courtesy of Dave Romm.)

Thankfully there's Wiener and Still Champion in Evanston, if I need my bacon fix. They have battered, deep fried bacon. I'm intrigued, but scared, and have yet to order it.