Cooking under Pressure

I was given a pressure cooker by my husbands father when his second wife died.  His wife cooked with it all the time and the meals that came out of it where fabulous. However,  I remember all too well the explosion in my family home when mum used one, and one of my friends has a hole in the ceiling of her kitchen when the lid flew off the cooker.
I was very nervous about using the cooker and it sat in my kitchen drawer for a long time before I built up the courage.  The first thing that I cooked in it was a piece of corned meat and I was pleasantly surprised at the tenderness of the beef and the small amount of time that it took to cook it so I started cooking all my corned meat in it.  And that's all really.  It wasn't until I picked up a little cookbook in Coles called "Pressure Cooking" - the new way to cook fast - that I decided to  experiment a little bit more with the cooker.  So I cooked up Osso Bucco that I would normally do in the slow cooker.  And it was at this time that my pressure cooker decided to die.  The seal was just too old (who would know that you are supposed to replace them every year!) and the cooker would not build up pressure.  As I had only allowed an hour to cook the meal, it was not great.  So I decided to buy a new one.  That's when the dilemma  started, do I go electric or cooktop.  There is a huge difference in price, the electric being the cheaper. I decided on the cooktop one because the electric defeats the purpose of being energy and time efficient.
The meal I cooked tonight was Green Chicken Curry.  It took 20 minutes with about 5 minutes of prep time and the chicken was extremely succulent.  The pressure cookers of today are much more user friendly and very safe to use.  Mine has a timer that tells me when to reduce the heat under the cooker and when the meal is cooked.  No more guessing any more.  It came with a beautiful cookbook by Suzanne Gibbs and I have promised myself that I am going to use it regularly.  I will keep you posted.

All shiny and new!

Ingredients for Green Chicken Curry

And 20 minutes later, the end result!