My family demanded paella. Demanded, I tell you! I was packing for my family vacation at our cottage on Lake Erie, and Diane asked if I was bringing my paella pan. When we got there, my brother asked if I brought my pan, and my Dad asked if he could buy the seafood. Paella? of course…once I run back home for the pan, which I forgot to put in the car. (I had to go back for my hernia surgery anyhow. The surgery went fine, thanks for asking.) Paella is THE traditional Spanish dish, with rice, seafood, chorizo, and a pinch of saffron, cooked outdoors over a wood fire. It’s their equivalent of our backyard barbecue – cooked by the guys, gathered around the fire with a tasty beverage to keep them hydrated while they stir the pan over the heat. I make paella on my kettle grill to add that hint of smoke. Paella pans are wide and shallow to cook the rice properly. Which is another reason to use the grill; stove burners …

I’m in a hurry tonight. I’m in a hurry every night, and for some reason that surprises me. It shouldn’t be a shock: I have three teenagers. The school year is winding down with band concerts, final projects, and sports schedules. And yet…my mind thinks I have lots of free time to get stuff done. Why do my expectations not match reality? Why do I assume I should be able to do it all – day job, blog, kids, family, and have time to relax? Here’s a quick Thai curry for a week like this one.  I leave it on Keep Warm mode so everyone can serve themselves as they straggle in from their evening activities. Recipe: Pressure Cooker Thai Red Beef Curry What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts My other Pressure Cooker Recipes Enjoyed this post? Want to help out DadCooksDinner? Subscribe to DadCooksDinner via email and share this post with your friends. Want to contribute directly? Donate to my Tip Jar, or buy something from Amazon.com …

I feared beets. I have a vague taste memory: cloyingly sweet sauce, crumbly texture, and a hint of mud. I must have had canned beets, and it did NOT go well, but I can’t dredge up any actual memories other than that sickly sweet taste. My wife is a big beet fan and begged me to try them. No way. I draw the line here. Beets on one side, everything else on the other. Beets made my stomach do barrel rolls. As I got into cooking, I couldn’t escape. Colorful beet salads, roasted beet side dishes, traditional beet soups. I held out. Then I focused on local, seasonal produce, and a regular shopper at my farmers market. In the summer, Ohio’s farms overwhelmed us with their variety. In the winter? My local vegetables are all about storing root vegetables and hearty greens. Sure, I love carrots and potatoes…but every week? By the time February rolls in, cold and bleak, I’m desperate for something new. That’s when the beets got me. I picked up a bunch and brought …

I’m St. Patrick’s Day traditionalist. Give me corned beef and cabbage, soda bread, and a pint of Guinness. That’s all I need. I fine-tuned my Pressure Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage recipe last year; the trick of slicing it into 4 smaller roasts makes it cook evenly – and much faster – than cooking the whole slab of beef at once. Instead of a new recipe, have an old Irish blessing: May the blessings of the day be the blessings you need the most, and may the most you wish for be the least you get. Here’s a link to the recipe: Pressure Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone! What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Your favorite Irish blessings? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts My other Pressure Cooker Recipes Enjoyed this post? Want to help out DadCooksDinner? Subscribe to DadCooksDinner via email and share this post with your friends. Want to contribute directly? Donate to my Tip Jar, or buy something from Amazon.com through the links …

Throwback Recipe Link: Pressure Cooker Turkey Giblet Gravy Pressure Cooker Giblet Gravy is one of my evergreen recipes. I pull it up every Thanksgiving. Or, should I say, about now – the week before Thanksgiving. One of my Thanksgiving Dinner strategies is making gravy ahead of time. Thanksgiving dinner is as much about logistics as it is cooking. I make this recipe early in the week of Thanksgiving – I take the giblets out of the bird when I dry brine it, then move on to making the gravy in my pressure cooker. It’s a relief to have the gravy ready to go a few days ahead of time – that makes for one less thing to juggle on the big day. Check out the recipe here: Pressure Cooker Turkey Giblet Gravy What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below. Related Posts Pressure Cooker Smashed Garlic Red Skin Potatoes Rotisserie Turkey with Basic Dry Brine (Hey, they’re not all pressure cooker recipes!) Bread Stuffing with Cranberries and Apples My …

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 …