Transcript
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You're tired. It's been a long day. You're hungry. And so is everybody else in the family.
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What are you going to cook for dinner? Today we're talking about our very favorite kitchen appliance that helps us get dinner on the table fast. You're listening to the smarter Healthy Living podcast where we firmly believe that getting healthy should never feel like torture.
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We're your host, Jared and Anita Roussel were college sweethearts, and health professionals who help you redefine what getting healthy looks like using a whole food plant based lifestyle. It's time to hear from the experts and learn the best tips and tricks that helped others get beyond the overwhelm, to create a vibrant life they love. If you're sick and tired of being sick, and tired, you're in the right place. So pull up a virtual chair, grab your matcha latte, and let's get started.
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Hey, friend, welcome to this episode. We're so glad to have you join us. I'm really excited about what we're talking about today. Let me tell you something, I could talk about this thing for a long time. I love it so much. But we'll try not to keep you too long. We just want to give you the really good facts that are going to help you make a great decision about how to save some time in your kitchen. So today we're talking about one of our very favorite kitchen appliances, the instant pot. Now a lot of people ask me why in the world Jad need one I mean, I already have a rice cooker, I've got an oven.
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But I'm telling you, this thing saves us more time than about anything else I can think of in my kitchen. Now, we've already talked about one of my all time favorites, but I'll tell you, this has to run a close second, you know, we talked about the the Vitamix or the NutriBullet in Episode Number eight. If you have not had a chance to listen to that, go back and get some great ideas for a blender option. But today, we're going to talk about the instant pot and just making things super simple, very quick and easy. And right there on your plate in no time. It's just one of our biggest time saving kitchen appliances. even listen to even has a keep warm option which I absolutely love because your food doesn't get cold after it's prepared. If you're not ready to eat it right that second it just automatically flips over to keep warm.
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There's cold food is her kryptonite. She hates cold food.
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Now you're telling my secrets. I do not normally like coffee. There are a couple of things. I like cold this is meant to be cold. That is so true. you're sharing my secrets.
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We're being transparent here.
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Yeah, because what I do know, I think maybe that comes from my dad because he was a cook. He was a chef by parents and a restaurant. And you know, they really just liked cooking it and people being able to enjoy it right away and getting it fresh. Well, it'd be ready.
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And he'd say, hey, come get it while it's hot. So what happens now whenever I have a meal ready?
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Well, if we get there kind of late and it gets a little cold, even if I don't mind it, she just she just doesn't like you
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know, I don't like it.
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It's all that to say the keyboard function is my friend.
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I love the keyboard, whatever favorite parts of the incident.
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But there's so much so many things to love. I mean, the thing is amazing. It's like having a little sous chef in the kitchen. And it just speeds things up. I mean, one way I do that is ours has a saute feature. And so you press this button. And while you're putting in different ingredients, what happens is it already is heating up for you. So instead of setting it for pressure, or manual setting, you go ahead and put it on saute, and you can put your veggies then and it'll start sizzling those and kind of cooking those down, it really adds flavor as well, when you can do that. It's almost like browning your onions, or browning your bell peppers or whatever, right there in the instant pot. And if you're putting water in to do a grind or something, it can be heating up your water as well. And that also speeds up the time that it takes it to get up to pressure.
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And it simplifies things because you're not having to saute on the stove top where you're getting the stove top messy or getting another dish messy absolutely simplifies cleanup afterwards, too.
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Yeah, I'm all about that.
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You know, that's a big thing around here. We just don't have time. We're just too busy for all that. So really, the other thing that I love about it is you can set it and forget it. I mean, we had company not too long ago and it was fantastic.
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We were heading out to the beach, and I thought what in the world am I gonna do? We're leaving pretty early. It's before lunch. By the time I get back. It'll be a little bit after a typical lunchtime right and everybody's gonna be hungry.
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We knew it was gonna be a few hours, get to the beach, be in there getting our stuff off the beach getting back home.
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Yeah, and then we come back in and the kids are I'm hungry what's for dinner and they're getting in the pantry and rifling around and pulling out their Apple chips and pulling out. Yeah, I mean just going crazy on stuff and I'm trying to get something right And that just doesn't work very well. It's really easy. If you have something that you can just get ready beforehand, you don't have to worry about it messing up your kitchen or anything like that. And you just come home.
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And what happened we walk in, and it just, it smelled amazing.
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We walk in, and there's this wonderful smell of this vegetable soup. And I had already cooked some beans in it the day before. So I took those, those chickpeas, that's what they were. And I put the chickpeas and just ladle them in there, they were already cooked.
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So after I opened up the instant pot, you can add things in after you've even cooked in it if you already have some things that are pre cooked and they just need to heat it up. And that kind of cooled down the soup a little bit. But it wasn't cold now warm, which was good.
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Well, with the preparation to while everybody was getting ready to for the beach, getting bathing suits on and getting chairs together and whatnot. She took that time to cut the vegetables and get it in there. So there wasn't really any wasted time.
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Yeah, actually, I mean, you think about cooking a vegetable soup. All I did was add some herbs and spices, some liquid, all my vegetables, threw those in, shut the lid and press start. I mean, really, it was so quick, I probably had that whole pot of soup ready for how many of us were there, none of us were 10 of us. Yeah. And actually, it fed everybody. And we still had some leftovers.
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Because we have an eight quart, which is a great size that we recommend. I think they do have one option for a 10 quart if you have a really large family. But the a CT is great. Even for smaller families, you might think oh, we never eat that much. But you've got to look at saving time overall, you want to make this the easiest, best way you've ever lived so that you'll love it forever. And you'll keep doing it. Because you won't think this is so difficult. And I've always got to be cooking.
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If you just take a little time each week and cook up some things in your Insta pot.
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Literally toss them in there, press Start and they're done.
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And then you can store them store them in another container either during the week in your refrigerator just to grab a news. Or you can put them in your freezer and freeze them for a much lighter date. And it just makes life so much simpler, simpler having those things ready ahead of time. So I love to batch cook and easily freeze for lighter with larger batches.
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And also we do the one that we have a lot of people are probably wondering what we have is the Instant Pot Ultra HD.
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It's an older one, we've had it for years never had any problems with it. I love it because it again, it makes the larger batches and it has a lot of different options like you can make yogurt in it even it has a little younger making function, which is funny because we've had it for a long time. But I haven't done it yet. But just knowing that I can do that and learn how to make vegan yogurt which is still on my list to do.
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You know you think they've been doing this for a really long time. They've got it all figured out. They've done they've done everything and it's still a journey for us. We're constantly learning new things. There's it's fun. Yeah, we love it. We love to keep ourselves on our toes even and as we're constantly learning new things we share them with the people that we surround ourselves with as well. So we like to get in our groups and share the new things we're learning as we go as well. But just knowing all the things we know and have learned on this journey, this thing is wonderful. But we did look it up and it looks like the EVO plus is one of the ones that we would would recommend the most
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closest to what we have now. available.
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It is it's available and I think it's a three CT which I wouldn't even consider even with a smaller family like I said but the six CT could be good eight CT again I highly recommend eight and then I think they do have another model
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the benefit with eight is you can always go less I mean if you wanted to do a smaller portion you can do a smaller portion but you can't ever go more with one of the smaller ones. You may be able to cook twice in it but then that makes it a longer process for you. So if you if you can spare the extra dollar or heaven to spend then I would recommend trying to get the bigger one
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and I know there are a lot of other brand names out there besides Instant Pot that are electric pressure cookers.
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But this one just their brand gets amazing results across the board people give it incredible reviews and we'll put a link below for the one that we recommend the most highly that works really well. And always look for a stainless steel pot you want to have one you know some of them have a little cheapy nonstick pot and the Teflon just really is not a great option
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no and they can chip off or you can scrape off in your food.
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Now you really don't want to eat that
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that was one of the things that attracted us to the Instant Pot initially because we've had some other cookers like this and they did work well. But they had the Teflon coated pots and yes they did clean easily. But we just didn't feel like it was a good trade off for having that Teflon. In the food.
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I'm they're having trouble cleaning my Instant Pot that stainless steel. I mean the insert pot is super easy and you have the one pot everything In the one pot, it's very quick cleanup. And everything just washes off nicely. And another great thing about it is I have the silicone lid with mine, I can't remember if it came with it or not it made it a class.
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And we bought the separate. But I love that because it doesn't have the handle of a glass lid, which again, that's also great.
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You know what, what, I think it may have come with the silicone, but we had to buy the glass lids separately.
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Mm Hmm, maybe,
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but with whatever model you get
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you they may come with different things,
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it may have different features already that come with it.
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But we really, I really like that because I can take the pot out, we eat it, if there's anything left, I can store it in that same pot for the next day or the next and it just works very, very well. Even if you want to use it, that's the only problem I have is that I use it so often. I mean, honestly multiple times a day, we've even talked about getting a second one, which I think is in our near near future, we're going to be doing them for
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sure. Because the reason being is we may make a suit, but then also want to cook some rice,
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or rice and then cook some beans or vegetables and want to cook something and there's so many different things you can do with it. And we're gonna get into that in just a few minutes. And the other thing is there are a lot of different inserts available, you can get steamer baskets, and have air fryer options as well. So if those things are important for you look for a model that has that. One thing I love about mine too, is it has the option of a delay timer. So if I know I'm getting home at a certain time, and I'm going to be gone most of the day, I can throw all the ingredients in there, set it Don't worry about it come in, when we walk in the door, it smells great, everything's ready. And it happened right on time because I set my delight timer, and I didn't have to worry about it.
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And the significance of that is that if you cook it right as you leave this so you're going to be gone for six hours and you cook it right as you leave and it stays on that keep warm function, it stays really very warm, and your food may cook. And if it's something that you want a certain texture, like with beans, if they cook for too long, they might get softer get kind of mushy, exactly just it may not work out perfectly. So in that case, we could set the timer for about four hours, five hours, have it cooked, and then it's ready as we come in.
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So you're probably wondering, what do we cook in it? And that's a great question.
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We cook a lot of different things in it. One of the things I love to cook our grains now we've talked about grains a bit in some of the previous episodes you may want to listen back for that. But we really want to look at variety here because it's really easy to get stuck in a rut of cooking. Just rice you think okay, Instant Pot just rice Oh and by the way if I didn't mention that before you definitely don't need a rice cooker if you're looking to just get have one thing that does it all this can replace your rice cooker I've been very happy with the rice has turned out for us we make a lot of brown rice. We recommend that ever white rice and that's coming up in a future episode. But we want you to know that you can cook a lot of different things in it I mean we cook millet in it we cook rice in it not just brown we cook wild rice which has a wonderful flavor so as you varied the different types of rice as you're eating you get different flavors you get different textures.
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It rice
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yeah nutrients black rice, we like red
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bean wha
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try something new Do not ever let whole food plant base get boring for you. It never should. There's so many options within the different categories.
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The rice always comes out perfect and we just like it I mean you can even get really great sticky rice where we use it to even to make sushi straight out of the instant pot.
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It works fantastic.
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But we use that the sushi rice also for our grain bowls.
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of our grain balls so
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good and the chew on it's perfect.
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Yeah, I mean you can use rice in a ton of things. And then you've got beans. What can you not put a bean in? Seriously you can make brownies with beans no joke. Beans are banned at stick. Okay, I see a bean episode coming up in the future.
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I won't even go there but just get your beans in your instant pot. Really. I mean you throw your beans and your water in and it's done. Now I like to add a lot of seasonings. I'd like to add a lot of veggies in there.
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It's a great way to get extra vegetables, watch the greens.
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Yeah but if you're in a hurry and you just want to throw the beans and water in there and they're done, they're still better than what you're going to get out of a can. Now we're not anti canned beans that can speed up your time in the kitchen and we're all about saving time. But if you have a little bit of time beans can be done in an hour or less. If you set them overnight that can be done as quickly as 20 minutes in your instant pot.
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So beans are something you want to keep on hand they give you a ton of fiber and make you feel great and they go and incredible number of dishes. Now, potatoes Did you know you can bake potatoes In an instant pot, even without the airfryer option, you can bake potatoes in your instant pot. Not just white potatoes, sweet potatoes that are orange, and purple, and white. They're wonderful in there. And the other thing you can do is you can steam them, you can steam other vegetables, get a steamer insert, put a little water in the bottom, and most likely your instant pot instruction manual will tell you how to do this. But if not just look up steamed vegetables in the instant pot. You can do stews and curries, squash, pumpkin, a ton of other things.
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You could do steamed broccoli and cauliflower. We talked about that as well. The instant pot, it really is almost limitless what you can do with the thing and it makes me happy. I mean, I like creating a life that makes me happy. That's one of the reasons Jared and I love living this way. Because when you find the simple ways to do things, and you get the right recipes, and you can learn the formulas, just the simple formulas to make it enjoyable. You're gonna stick with it for a lifetime, there's not going to be something you dread that you have to push yourself to do for the rest of your life. What kind of life is that, right? So get in there and find the things that you enjoy that make your life simple. And go for it. You can do this. It is not hard. Get that instant pot in there and start creating something unique, something special, something you and your family will love. Enjoy it. And we look forward to seeing you next time. On smarter Healthy Living before you go. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a written review. We love to hear from you. And we'll see you on the next episode.
