Basmati Rice in Instant Pot
Brown Rice in Instant Pot

The Instant Pot has been such a wonderful help for me.  I know rice is not complicated to make, but there’s something about just throwing it in the IP that makes it that much more effortless.

My personal fav of these two is the brown rice.  It comes out buttery and perfect every time.  But lately my kids have been requesting basmati instead, so that’s been our new go-to.  I love mixing rice with pesto or vegetables.  The kids love rice vinegar and cucumbers mixed into theirs.  Rice is something my I know my one picky eater will always eat, so I love having these simple recipes on hand.

Recipe

I gotta say that when I first realized that I could cook chicken in the InstantPot, it was a game-changer.  I seriously dislike handling raw chicken, and I’ve always teetered on vegetarianism.  I feel like I eat meat more because it’s something my body needs, rather than because I want to.  ANYway.  I’ve been cooking all chicken in the IP for awhile, but I branched out the other night and tried this recipe.  Wowza!  It was so amazing.  And even though I did have to handle the chicken a bit, it was pretty darn easy.  Even the leftovers were so tender and tasty.  I highly recommend this!

Homemade Thin Mint recipe

Help!!  I’ve just discovered an amazing recipe for homemade Thin Mints.  And as skeptical as I was when I was making these, once I gave them a little bit of time to chill in the freezer, they went from pretty good to INCREDIBLE!!  I don’t know that I’d call them a “clone” of the original as the recipe maker did, but they don’t have to be clones, because they are better!

Even though I recently signed my daughter up as an independent Girl Scout, I’m a bit anti-cookie sales.  I know, I know.  I’m probably going to Girl Scout jail for this.  But between the unhealthy and socially irresponsible ingredients and the all-out cookie wars I’ve heard parents get into about these, not to mention the environmental impacts of packaged goods and cheap, plastic prizes, it just seems to have lost its original wholesome purpose.  And it doesn’t quite match my idea of what this program is about.  It feels commercial and grabby and thoughtless, which is not what Girl Scouts stands for at all.  And I know this is not the approach taken by all the girls and families and troops, but there are just too many factors I dislike to be willing to participate in this aspect of scouting.

Anywho, it did get me reminiscing for some good ol Girl Scout cookies.  And while I disagree with many of the ingredients and steps involved in the boxed cookies, I still found myself wondering if we just couldn’t have a little taste of GS cookies.  And that’s when I found this.  This wickedly good and dangerous recipe.  I’m still wondering if just about anything covered in the chocolate mint sauce found at the end would taste the same, but for now, these are pretty rad.  I may try using the homemade Oreo cookies as a base someday; I’ll let ya know how that goes!  In the meantime, trips to our freezer have become a little too frequent…

Recipe

A friend of mine had gotten some advice to have asparagus the days before and after a vaccine shot, so I made this soup for us.  I wasn’t sure how the kids would do with whole asparagus, but when a couple pieces hopped out of the pot, I had them, and they were SO amazing.  Oh, well.  Next time.  But the soup was delicious, and I didn’t even grab a photo of it, because it was gone before I thought of it.

For this soup, I halved the recipe since I only had about 12 oz of asparagus.  I made a couple other small changes:

–I added two carrots (in pieces) to the 12 oz of asparagus.
–I added a small bit of pre-cooked onions and mushrooms from last night’s dinner.
–I added a little bit of thyme at the end.
–We didn’t have heavy cream, so I used this substitute. (Except, in this case, just a quarter of this recipe.)

It tasted like spring!  Yum!