I must talk about my Instant Pot a lot on Facebook because it seems like every time one of my friends gets one, they tag me in their posts about their new pot. Yes, I admit, I'm a little addicted to my Instant Pot. It's something I use at least 3-5 times a week. Sometimes I use it every day, but I have to tell you the reason I bought it originally. I tend to stock up when I see a good deal, so my freezer is generally full of frozen meat, but I'm not a good planner.
I really admire all of you who have the meal planning down for weeks or even the whole month. I'm just not good at that. I'm very bad at remembering to defrost meat for dinner and before I got my Instant Pot, when that happened, we'd wind up ordering pizza or getting take-out. The money we were spending on take-out was negating the money I was saving when I stocked the freezer with meat deals.
It was frustrating. I was also dealing with being newly diagnosed with Hashimoto's Disease and the fatigue and brain fog from that made it even harder to plan. Enter the Instant Pot.
I don't have to defrost meat! If I do, great, but if I don't, it's not a big deal. For instance, the other night, I was working and noticed it was already 5pm. Oops. I hadn't even THOUGHT about dinner. I went to the freezer and started to pull out a couple of frozen pizzas, but then I saw two packages of frozen chicken legs and thought, "why not?"
As you can see, these were frozen solid. I stuck them in the microwave just long enough to be able to get them out of the package so we wouldn't be eating plastic and styrofoam with our dinner.
I put my trivet in, added 1 cup of water and then the frozen solid chicken legs in two layers. My 6 qt Instant pot held 11 chicken legs. I sprinkled them with salt, pepper and some Fox Point Seasoning from Penzeys and closed the lid.
I hit the Manual button and set it for 25 minutes. I was honestly guessing and probably could have cut back for a few minutes. When I make homemade dog food, I cook the frozen chicken for 25 minutes so that it shreds easily and it's boneless, so I thought with the bone would cook through, but not fall apart.
This is what I found when I opened the pot after about 10 minutes of natural release time. Sorry for the photo. The pot was very hot still! I decided to pop them in the air fryer to brown the skin up. I put them in for about 7 minutes at 400 and turned them half way through.
Those drumsticks sure don't look they were frozen an hour before, do they? They were really perfect, not over done and putting them in the air fryer was a perfect way to finish them off. There was no oil used at all. Just the air fryer doing its magic!
So now you know why I bought my Instant Pot. It wasn't some big fancy reason and it wasn't even about cooking faster. It was to help me save money by not ordering take out and to stop making me feel bad for being so disorganized! I have to tell you though, the food that comes out of it is amazing and I'm so glad I bought mine.
