Ching Ohana Home Cooking Journal

Butter chicken is an Indian dish that was featured in an article from the New Yorker . We got the actual cookbook on our Kindle Unlimited subscription and made it. It came out great even if I didn't have cilantro. I omitted the last extra tsp of cayenne since I thought it might be too much for my daughter. I also used bone in skin on thighs (5 thighs) since we didn't have boneless skinless. I cut up the meat and put it in the bowl and ate the bones clean on my plate. Our kids ate it all up. There were even a couple of cups of sauce leftover for who knows what. The author suggests putting it on something but leaves that to our imagination. Putting it on... Rice? An omelet? Spaghetti? The chicken in the recipe was really only enough for one meal for the 4 of us with barely enough for leftovers for one person's lunch. I think you could easily double the chicken to 2 lb and have enough sauce except some of the chicken would stick out of the cooking broth.

Rigatoni in the Instant Pot tonight. There are recipes all over the internet for one pot, no boil pasta dishes, but we used this one . Quick release after 7 minutes of cooking. It came out good and the kids ate it up and got seconds. It could have used something extra. Sugar? Salt? Spicy? Noodles came out almost al dente though they continued cooking and became soft. Maybe we need to use a shorter time for cooking.

My mom's pork ribs recipe is as easy as it gets. Pork ribs from Costco. We boil them for about an hour. Be careful because if it's boiled to high it will spill all over the stove. Then brush with barbecue sauce and grill or broil until it's brown. We made these for a potluck of our kid's robotics team and they came out pretty good. The only thing was the parts sticking out of the water became kind of dry. Next time sous vide or Instant Pot! Sorry, no picture this time.

Okinawan Miso pork was one of the first things we cooked with the instant pot. Recipe is from the Aloha Instant Pot Facebook group . It took about 90 minutes from start to finish. I had half the meat so I halved the sauce. I think it could have used the full amount of sauce.

One of our favorite dinners is shabu shabu. Tonight I decided to make a better dashi. In the past we just boiled the konbu in water, but after reading Super Sushi Ramen Express I decided that we could do better. The Serious Eats dashi post led me to this Cooking Issues experiment on dashi .  To follow their recipe, I heated up a pot of water to 149 degrees F (65 degrees C) and then poured 2 L of this into a Ziploc bag with 20 g of konbu in it. I put the whole bag back into the pot, added a little more water, and set my sous vide circulator to 149 degrees F. I didn't have much time so I only cooked it for 30 minutes or so. Then I dumped it into another pot, took out the konbu, and brought it to a rolling boil. I added one packet bonito flakes and turned off the heat. I steeped this for 5 minutes then strained it. The result was so much better than boiled konbu! Next time maybe I'll try one of the cold extraction methods in the Cooking Issues post since one of the ben

After reading a lot of luau and lau lau posts on the Aloha Instant Pot Facebook group, it was time to try beef luau tonight. I used this recipe . It didn't specify how much taro leaf to use so I used 2 lbs (each bag at Safeway is 1 lb). I cut down the coconut milk to one can. Sides of lomi salmon, poke, and poi, and everyone was happy! The one drawback was that pressure cooking the luau leaf in two batches then pressure cooking the beef meant it took almost 2 hours from start to finish. Probably next time it would be better to just blanch the taro leaf first on the stove then throw it all together for maybe 45 minutes.

I got a new Anova sous vide machine for Christmas, and I wanted to try something that just wasn't possible with my old sous vide setup. The old one just heats the water, but the new one circulates water to eliminate hot zones. I made a soft boiled "onsen egg" this morning. I put the eggs in at 165 degrees for 13 minutes. The liquid white was not quite hard but the thicker white was set. The yolk inside was pretty runny but still warm and maybe a little thicker than raw yolk. In retrospect I should have taken a picture of that too, but it was very good. My son had two! The recipe was from Serious Eats .

Tonight's dinner was corn chowder and instant pot mushroom risotto. We had some leftover potatoes and milk so we made it into this delicious chowder.  The Instant Pot mushroom risotto came out soupy last time so we used less water this time (4 cups vs 6 cups). It came out pretty good although the grains of rice are still a little mushier than with the traditional stovetop technique.

This is a weekend favorite around here. Chicken was boneless skinless thighs cooked to shredding for 12 minutes in Instant Pot. The enchilada recipe was based on this one from Pioneer Woman .

Tonight's potluck dish was Galbi jjim. I made it in the Instant Pot following this recipe . I tripled the recipe which was a problem with our 6 quart pot. Not all the veggies fit inside and I cut down the water so that it wouldn't overfill the pot. The meat was a mix of some thick cut short ribs from Palama Supermarket and a couple of racks of beef short ribs from Safeway. Palama was $8.99/lb; Safeway was $2.99/lb. Not sure I could tell the difference. Either way, it came out amazing. Great potluck dish!

We had some leftover potatoes from making the stew so we made homemade hash browns today. I followed a recipe from Food52.com. The ratio was 5 medium sized Yukon gold potatoes and one onion. They came out so good that there wasn't time for a photo!

We made beef stew tonight tonight in the instant pot. The recipe was from Serious Eats. It came out great like all the other Serious Eats recipes we've tried. The special ingredient was gelatin. Not sure how much of a difference it made but it was delicious anyway. The only drawback is that it took about 3 hours from start to finish, including cutting up all the veggies, browning the meat and the veggies, and blending the sauce. Plus there was the time it took to heat up the pressure cooker (two pressure cooker steps). Meat was fall apart tender. I guess I can see why you need two steps so that the carrots and potatoes don't turn to mush. Oh well. I'll think twice about this one.

Instant pot chili from the Instant Pot website. The secret ingredient is fish sauce. :)

I've been working my way through the Serious Eats pressure cooker recipes , and they've all been delicious. Tonight was Kenji's chicken tikka Masala  in the Instant Pot. It came out great although my picky daughter didn't particularly care for it. I think she didn't like the tang of the fresh lemon juice. My son enjoyed it quite a bit.

This is our go to recipe for pancakes. I've been making these since Alton Brown's baking book I'm Just Here for More Food was published in 2004. It's very similar to the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook recipe but the Alton Brown version has the masses instead of just the volume measurements. I didn't have my usual equipment for making these so they came out a little uneven. Tasted pretty good still!

Instant pot 3 posts in a row! It took a long time to come to pressure, maybe because we cooked so much frozen chicken. The recipe came from the Facebook Instant Pot Hawaii group .

Our first home cooked meal of the year was another instant pot recipe, this time from  Serious Eats' list of pressure cooker recipes . I didn't have bacon so I used Portuguese sausage instead. It came out great. Definitely a make-again recipe.