Double checks that it’s not spelled “Capital”…phew, I’m good. US Senate bean soup – served every day in the lunchroom of our nation’s capitol – is a perfect example of the marriage of beans and smoked pork. In the Northeast, we use salt pork with beans, a holdover from our European roots and the sailors that crisscrossed the Atlantic. In the Southwest, we use bacon, while I imagine a cowboy nicknamed “cookie” stirring a cast iron pot, over a campfire, surrounded by the open prairie, the vast night sky above him. Here in the Midwest, pork and beans comes when we have a leftover hambone. In my case, I always get one from our Easter ham, and go looking for bean soup recipes to cook. Here’s a video of one of my favorites – and one of the more popular recipes on my site – US Senate bean soup. Navy beans and ham hocks are what I wrote the recipe for…but a hambone can easily be swapped in for the ham hocks. We want the …

Faol saol agat, gob fliuch, agus bás in Éirinn. A Gaelic toast: Long life to you, a wet mouth, and death in Ireland. I try to come up with a new recipe every St. Patrick’s day, but I spent this year re-working my corned beef recipe. (As usual, it took longer than I expected.) Instead of the new recipe, here is a Greatest Hits list  – my best St. Patrick’s Day recipes for the pressure cooker. (I’m actually making the last recipe in the list – Pressure Cooker Lamb Stew with Guinness and Barley – for St. Patrick’s Day this year. As much as I love Corned Beef and Cabbage, I have worn out its welcome with all the corned beef I’ve cooked over the last month. If I serve it again, I’ll have a mutiny on my hands.)   Pressure Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage Pressure Cooker Irish Lamb Stew Pressure Cooker Champ (Irish Mashed Potatoes with Green Onions) Pressure Cooker Lamb Stew with Guinness and Barley Slainte! What do you think? What are your …

St. Pattie’s day is coming, and I wanted to improve my Pressure Cooker corned beef recipe. That recipe was a pain to get right. The big piece of corned beef would not cook through in the pressure cooker. I kept increasing the time – 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 75 minutes…eventually I had to go to 90 minutes to get it to cook through. (That big piece of corned beef is dense, and it takes a long time for the heat to penetrate into the middle, even under pressure.) But…what if I tried the trick I learned when making my pressure cooker pot roast recipe, and cut the corned beef into smaller pieces? If I’m going to slice it when it comes out of the cooker, why not cut it before I put it in the cooker? It took a few tries to get the timing right – corned beef is stubborn that way – but a corned beef cut into 4 pieces cooked in 60 minutes. That’s 30 minutes cut off of the cooking time! …

There was an Italian restaurant in downtown Cleveland, famous for its endlessly simmering sauce. They had the same pot of sauce going for over 100 years, with new ingredients added to top it off as needed. It closed a few decades ago, but the image of a pot of sauce, simmering forever on the stove, constantly refreshed, stuck with me. This is not that sauce. Quite the opposite. This is my quick weeknight meat sauce, and one of the few pressure cooker meals my kids lobby for when I am making my grocery list. Someday I am gonna bag to do a real-deal Bolognese sauce in the pressure cooker; until then, I cheat with Italian sausage and get this recipe on the table ASAP. For those wondering about the video frame rate: I went with 12fps, sped up to 24 during the slowest parts. The voting is…confused. 12fps started out ahead. 24fps staged a furious comeback, and surged into the lead. 12fps made a late recovery, pulled ahead briefly, but then 24 caught up again. …

Laurie Colwin is the writer I want to be when I grow up. She was a novelist who passed away in 1992 at the age of 48 – much too young. (Especially since I passed that age last year…yikes.) I’ve never read her actual novels, though – I stumbled across her books a few years back, when she was profiled in the New York Times. I picked up her memoir/cookbook, Home Cooking, and immediately fell in love. She is a writer who also happens to love food, my favorite style of writing. I blew through Home Cooking, then bought More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, her second – and last – book of food writing. I savored it, reading slowly, one chapter at a time. Oh, and so I could take notes – most of which which went like this: “Lentil soup! Yes!” …OK, so my notes were not deep. It’s not that kind of cookbook. If you want precise measurements and exact instructions, look elsewhere. If you want a hymn to Lentil …

After yesterday’s Rotisserie Ribeye Roast video and recipe, I got a lot of questions – a LOT of questions – about other potential Christmas roasts. Here are some quick answers from my back catalog: Q: What about a Sous Vide Roast? Much to my surprise, this was my #1 question. Try my Sous Vide New York Strip Roast with Bourbon Cream Pan Sauce, and I promise I’ll have more sous vide roasts up soon. Sous Vide New York Strip Roast with Bourbon Cream Pan Sauce   Q: How do you fit that rotisserie spit in your pressure cooker? Ha. Ahahaha. A comedian. Here, try a 7 hour leg of lamb roast…which finishes in 90 minutes in the pressure cooker: Pressure Cooker 7 Hour Leg of Lamb (in 90 minutes) Pressure Cooker 7 Hour Leg of Lamb (in 90 minutes) Pressure Cooker Beef Pot Roast   Q: That ribeye roast looks good…but what about a beef tenderloin? Or a reverse seared prime rib roast? Or a cheaper eye of round roast? I’ve got you covered: Rotisserie …

Thanks to my friends at Certified Angus Beef® Brand for sponsoring DadCooksDinner! Looking for the best way to cook that roast? Check out their Roast Perfect App, available on the Apple App Store or the Google Play store. And, keep an eye on hashtag #BestBeef on Twitter and Facebook for great beef recipes from me and my fellow bloggers. Sunday. Gray, overcast, raining. Then sleet, then snow. I’m craving comfort food. Specifically, I need a big pot of beef stew. Or to hide under a blanket in front of a roaring fire. Or both! I made Pressure Cooker Beef Stew with Mushrooms, then hurried back to the sofa and my fleece blankie with a bowl of stew. But, before I cocooned myself for the evening, I shot this video to go with the recipe: Video Pressure Cooker Beef Stew with Mushrooms – Time Lapse [YouTube.com] Here is the original recipe: Pressure Cooker Beef Stew with Mushrooms What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts Pressure Cooker Basic Beef Stew …

Chicken broth is kitchen alchemy. It turns scraps and waste into liquid gold. A good broth is the main ingredient in pan sauces, adds depth to stews and chilis, and is the backbone of chicken soup. There are two ways to make chicken broth – from leftovers, and from scratch. For leftovers, you need the bones from a roast chicken or two, plus an onion. This recipe is slightly more involved; it is what I use when I don’t have a roast chicken carcass, and I need to buy the ingredients from the grocery store. I start with chicken backs, $0.49 a pound in the freezer at my local Acme grocery store, and add a mix of aromatics – carrot, celery, garlic, and onion, plus some bay leaves. Wings also work really well for broth – they have lots of connective tissue, which makes for a rich, gelatin filled broth – but wings are expensive. (If you make a lot of chicken wings, save the wing tips in a bag in the freezer for broth.) …

Apologies to Lyle Lovett Why is a boy from the suburbs of Cleveland known among friends, family, and co-workers for his Texas Red Chili? I’m not from Texas. I get to visit from time to time – my Day Job occasionally takes me to Austin – but I’m about as Midwestern Yankee as you can get. I’ve always loved chili – it’s the perfect meal for a brisk fall day. Years ago, I picked up a Betty Crocker “Soups, Stews and Chili” recipe booklet in the checkout line of the grocery store. Chili? Sure, I’ll check it out. Most of the book was bland, boring recipes. Except for the treasure, hidden in the middle of the book. Eight pages of winning recipes from the ICS Chili Cookoff, from 1987 (Margo’s Chili) through 1993 (Puppy’s Breath Chili). Don’t ask me how they got in there – I’m guessing Betty Crocker was a sponsor? – but those recipes were a revelation to an Ohio boy. Chunks of beef, lots and lots of chili powder, and No Beans …

Throwback Tuesday Time Lapse! Here is a time lapse video for one of my most popular pressure cooker recipes – Pressure Cooker Ground Beef and Bean Chili. And, by “most popular”, I mean “recipe that is most popular with my chili-loving son”. It is actually my 13th most viewed pressure cooker recipe, according to my blog statistics. Here is the new video: Pressure Cooker Ground Beef and Bean Chili Time Lapse Video – YouTube Recipe here: Pressure Cooker Ground Beef and Bean Chili [Update 2016-09-13] To answer commenter Russel G’s question, here are my top 5 most popular pressure cooker recipes: Pressure Cooker Mac and Cheese (my most popular recipe in a landslide) Pressure Cooker Red Beans and Rice Pressure Cooker Short Ribs Pressure Cooker Texas Red Chili Pressure Cooker Thai Green Chicken Curry What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts Pressure Cooker Texas Red Chili Pressure Cooker 15 Bean Chili Pressure Cooker Chili Verde (Green Pork Chili) My other Pressure Cooker Recipes My other Pressure Cooker …

Throwback Thursday Recipe: Pressure Cooker Cochinita Pibil (Yucatecan pit-cooked pork) I was having a back and forth with a reader about this recipe. PC Cochinita Pibil one of my old-school pressure cooker recipes, way back before I owned an electric PC, and he wanted to know about the timings. I went through and updated the recipe, and figured, while I’m at it I’ll share it out again. Enjoy one of my classics: Cochinita Pibil What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts Pressure Cooker Tortilla Soup Pressure Cooker Braised Lamb Shoulder Tacos Pressure Cooker Refried Pinto Beans My other Pressure Cooker Recipes   Enjoyed this post? Want to help out DadCooksDinner? Subscribe to DadCooksDinner via eMail or RSS reader, recommend DadCooksDinner to your friends, and buy something from Amazon.com through the links on this site. Thank you.

Programming note: I’m on vacation for most of July, out of town with my family. To keep the blog posts coming, I’m doing Throwback Thursdays, bringing back popular recipes from the archives. (This also forces me to update older recipes to use my new recipe plugin, so they are formatted and printable. Win-win!) Throwback Recipe Link: Pressure Cooker Hummus Dad, your hummus is better than this. I’m not a hummus snob. I know that I can make better hummus myself, but I’m not ashamed of picking up a tub of hummus from the store. My daughter, though? She called me out at dinner for taking the shortcut. She took one bite, then gave me a hard look. What am I trying to get away with? I mean, she’s right…I make a great hummus, especially when I start from dried chickpeas…but, dang, I’m trying to get dinner on the table on our first day back from vacation, with my wife out of town at a conference. What’s making her so choosy? Check out the recipe here: …

Programming note: I’m on vacation for most of July, out of town with my family. To keep the blog posts coming, I’m doing Throwback Thursdays, bringing back popular recipes from the archives. (This also forces me to update older the formatting on older recipes. Win-win!) Throwback Recipe Link: Rotisserie Chicken with Tex-Mex Rub “Did you bring the rotisserie?” Darn. I’m out at my family’s cottage on Lake Erie, spending a week with my brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. I’m unpacking my jumbo 26.5 inch Weber kettle – doesn’t everyone go on vacation with a grill in the trunk? – when my brother’s eyes light up. “I’ll get us a rib roast and we can cook it on the rotisserie!” Sorry, Pat. I don’t have a rotisserie for this jumbo kettle. I thought the larger cooking surface would be more important than the rotisserie…but obviously, I let the team down. In honor of the missing rotisserie, here’s a Throwback Thursday rotisserie chicken recipe, with a quick and easy homemade spice rub. Check out the recipe …

  Programming note: I’m on vacation for most of July, out of town with my family. (Last week was Chicago, next week is Lake Erie.) To keep the blog posts coming, I’m bringing back popular recipes from my archives for Throwback Thursday. (This also forces me to update older the formatting on older recipes. Win-win!) Throwback Recipe Link: Pressure Cooker Mexican Pork Stew with Summer Vegetables The height of summer vegetable season is upon us! Green beans are plentiful, and fresh corn and tomatoes are starting to show up. This recipe is a a favorite of mine, inspired by a corn and squash soup I had when I visited Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s a light take on Mexican; there is no heavy, dried chile based broth with this one, just fresh summer vegetables, including the classic Mexican trio of corn, beans, and squash. Looking to use up the summer bounty of your garden, CSA, or farmers’ market? Give this stew a try. (Even better, the pressure cooker won’t heat up the house as much with its quick …

Programming note: I’m on vacation for most of July, out of town with my family. To keep the blog posts coming, I’m bringing back popular recipes from my archives for Throwback Thursday. (This also forces me to update older the formatting on older recipes. Win-win!) Throwback Recipe Link: Grilled Cheeseburgers (Grilling Basics) I do a lot of elaborate recipes on my blog – reverse seared tomahawk steaks, rotisserie chickens, pressure cooker Texas red chili…the list goes on and on. But, in the real world, I’m a harried dad with a day job, and on a summer weeknight, my family’s favorite dinner is burgers. Nothing fancy, nothing elaborate, just ground beef, a bun, and cheese. (Of course, I’ll throw in some grilled onions, just because I can’t help myself.) Check out the recipe here: Grilled Cheeseburgers (Grilling Basics) What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts Fire Roasted Poblano Burgers Duck Burgers with Blue Cheese and Spinach Grilled Portobello Mushroom Burgers My other Grilling Recipes   Enjoyed this post? …

  Programming note: I’m on vacation for most of July, out of town with my family. To keep the blog posts coming, I’m doing Throwback Thursdays, bringing back popular recipes from the archives. (This also forces me to update older the formatting on older recipes. Win-win!) Throwback Recipe Link: BBQ Basics: Pulled Pork (on a kettle grill) I wanted to do more low and slow BBQ on my kettle grill this summer, so I did what I always do – I got a new gadget. I bought a BBQ Guru digital temperature controller, drilled a 1-inch hole in my jumbo 26.5 inch kettle grill just below the grill grate, and plugged it in for a test run with some pulled pork. The BBQ Guru is a blower controlled by a thermometer that you put in the grill. When the grill gets too cool, the fan turns on and fires up the coals; when the grill gets too cool, the fan shuts off and cools the grill down. pork. I’ll have more news on the BBQ Guru …