cover image Family Meals from Scratch in Your Instant Pot: Healthy and Delicious Home Cooking Made Fast

Family Meals from Scratch in Your Instant Pot: Healthy and Delicious Home Cooking Made Fast

Lisa Burns. Page Street, $21.99 (192p) ISBN 978-1-62414-752-4

This debut from This Pilgrim Life blogger Burns lives up to its title—creating family meals from scratch—but does little to distinguish itself from other Instant Pot cookbooks. Burns is upfront that “easy” doesn’t always mean “quick” when it comes to using the various functions of the Instant Pot. However, many of Burns’s recipes take just as long in the Instant Pot as they do using traditional methods, such as stuffed burgers (25 minutes to prepare and cook), spaghetti and meatballs (30 minutes to prepare, including browning), buffalo cauliflower bites (50 minutes total, including broiling to finish), and hummus (which takes 75 minutes to prepare, when it can be done in a few minutes using canned beans rather than unsoaked chickpeas). That said, there are several quick, flavorful dishes that stand out: pimento and sausage grits, a garlicky creamy chicken risotto, a chicken tortellini soup, and taco-chicken nachos with chipotle-lime yogurt sauce. While there’s little new for fans of the popular kitchen appliance in this solid cookbook, Burns’s instructions are crisp and clear. [em](May) [/em]