Friday in the Kitchen

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Not sure this will be a weekly series or not.  Just testing it out :) 


Today I have a few things to share with you that I've done recently.


Salads

I make a lot of salads. We enjoy them, and it is a great way to get many multi colored veggies into our diet. I do like to add various things to my salads to keep them interesting.

While on Pinterest I found this recipe. It is called Cucumber Salad, but in the end it is more like sweet pickles in taste. I made a batch and we enjoyed them quite a bit. I used them as a topper to our daily salads. It was nice to have the onions and peppers added in. It was easy to make as well.

I cut up all my veggies (I used regular cucumbers from the grocery store as pickling cucumbers are not available this time of year and it turned out fine), put them in a large bowl and sprinkled the salt over them. Then made my brine, filled a 2 quart canning jar with the veggies and poured the brine over them...
 



Super easy and they lasted us a couple weeks before we had finished them all up.


If you are looking for a great lunch salad, or light dinner salad, look no further than this recipe. It is for Chicken Bacon Salad. And it is wonderful!! I cooked my chicken and my eggs (at the same time) up in my Instant Pot and while that was cooking, I fried up the bacon and assembled the rest of the ingredients. I plan on making this again, very soon. It was so good.




Instant Pot

I'd planned on a meal that needed cooked hamburger in it. But, I'd forgot to take the hamburger out of the freezer. Not a great thing to remember an hour before dinner time.. :) What to do? Use my IP of course! Did you know you can defrost and cook your frozen hamburger up at the same time? You can.. and here is how I did it..

Put the trivet or a steamer basket in your IP. Add 1 ½ cups of water and put your frozen block of hamburger (this was 1# of hamburger) on top.



Close the lid, set the sealing knob to “seal” and set the IP on “manual” for 20 minutes.
 
When it is done, do a quick release of the pressure. This is what you will have..



Now remove the hamburger with tongs and put in a bowl. Use 2 forks to break the meat up and it is ready to use. The meat is moist and cooked through completely..




If you are doing more than 1#, you made need a little extra time. If your hamburger has not cooked completely, simply put the lid back on and give it a few more minutes to finish cooking.


That is all from the kitchen for today.. :)

 

Comments

  1. ThreadBearFebruary 25, 2017 at 11:25 AM

    Hello, you are really getting a lot of use out of that instant pot! My big question is : have you made yogurt in it yet? I was wondering how low is temperature at that setting? Or how low can you go with it? My regular crockpot is still to hot (eventually boiling) on the warm setting. I am looking for a cooker that keeps the temp. below 130. Thank you for any information!

    ReplyDelete
  2. MonaFebruary 26, 2017 at 5:32 PM

    Hello again, my friend! I have a couple of questions for you. I hope you don't mind. First is I got an IP for Christmas on your recomend and LOVE IT! so now I wondered if you could share what you use to grind your wheat with. I would like to start doing it but I am not sure which one to buy. Also what wheat berries you use. Second thing would be where you purchase your wheat berries and sucanat from. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. CrystalMarch 1, 2017 at 5:54 PM

      Hi Mona!! Sorry for the late reply.. Yay for your IP!! I hope you enjoy it. You must be reading my website.. :) For 20 some years I ground wheat and made all our bread.. today I don't do that.. I guess I'm worn out.. :) But I will answer what I did do.. I had a Retsel Grain Mill the Mill Right http://www.retsel.com/ . It was an excellent mill. I made 6 to 12 loaves a bread a week and did more baking on top of that and it worked like a champ. I know there are less expensive options today that are probably very good but I am not aware of them. I purchased my grain through Azure Standard https://www.azurestandard.com/ For my bread I used hard white wheat, for quick breads I used soft white wheat.. I hope that helped to answer your questions! Crystal :)

      Delete

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