Red Bean and Coconut Milk Soup (Pressure Cooker Recipe)

No soaking required, dried red beans can be turned into tender enough with “sandy” consistency just around an hour. Are you intrigued to try? If you are like me, here's a quick recipe for making red bean dessert with a pressure cooker. If you still want to make red bean dessert over stove top, please see the notes below the recipe.

Whenever I make our traditional Chinese red bean soup, I need to soak the beans for at least 3 hours or overnight before cooking about one to two hours, depending on how I like the consistency. I’m a big fan of all kinds of red bean desserts but couldn’t make any if without any planning ahead.

So I searched the internet high and low and tried to see if there’s a kitchen gadget that could help me out.

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Japanese Pork Tender Rib Stew (Pressure Cooker + Stovetop + Video)

This Japanese pork tender rib stew dish can be served with rice or noodle soup. For those who don’t have an Instant Pot yet, I inserted the stovetop instructions for making this delicious dish.

It’s so much fun to explore the functions of my new kitchen toy, Instant Pot. This time my project was to test its “stew” function.

The pork tender ribs ( aka 豬軟骨 pork cartilage) from a nearby Asian butcher was only required 35 minutes of pressure cooking. They turned really tender with almost-fell-off-the-bone meat.

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Chinese Yam and Pork Shin Congee (Pressure Cooker Recipe)

Chinese yam (aka 淮山 or山藥 in Chinese) is commonly used in Chinese cooking, especially for making soup and congee.

Again I experimented my new kitchen toy, Instant Pot, to make a large pot of pork congee. How was the outcome? I was quite impressed by its pressure cooking power. After running only a cycle of its “porridge” function, about 20 minutes, all the rice turned to be very soft and started to break apart. The texture was like the “Chiu Chau Teochew” (潮州粥) version. It’s good enough indeed. Yet my family used to have the Cantonese version, with all grains totally broken down, giving you a thicker consistency, not as runny as Teochew version.

So, I took one more step to achieve that consistency. It’s not that complex as I thought. Simply press the “saute” button and cook for 15 minutes or so. Voila! The congee was just like the one that we used to enjoy. Initially, I had a bit of worry if the rice would stick to the inner pot bottom. Luckily, it proved that I got the right pressure cooker to make our favourite Chinese congee.

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Pumpkin Puree (Instant Pot Recipe)

It’s pumpkin season again. I’ve got a large beautiful pumpkin for just 1 dollar. Pumpkin is so versatile. It can be used to make a savoury dish, dessert, cake or rice dish. You name it, you can make it. Even this simple pumpkin puree can be used as filling or sauce, subtly giving a natural sweetness to your whole dish.

I don’t want to miss any chance to test my new kitchen toy, Instant Pot. I was quite impressed with its steaming function. It really shortened a lot of cooking time, even though the size of the pumpkin chunks were quite large. The flesh was very soft that could be easily scooped out with a spoon. Without a doubt, if not using a pressure cooker, you can steam it in a wok or large pot.

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