When I was younger I could eat whatever old nonsense came my way but as I’ve become more…ahem…."experienced", it’s clear that food fundamentally effects my health, my energy and my mood. I’m plowing through Paul Pitchford’s "Healing with Whole Foods" right now and I LOVE it’s openess to ALL diets and it’s wisdom about what each food is and does to your body. It’s inspiring me to pick up my foodie blog again so here I am. Much more to come.
Is a pressure cooker worth owning? I would say YES! You can fully cook black, pinto, cranberry, kidney, lima and red beans in 15-18 minutes including the cool down time after the pressure cooker gets turned off. This is in contrast to 1-2 hours to fully cook hard beans. In addition, pressure cooked beans come out consistently tender and evenly cooked.
The time saved cooking rice isn’t quite so extreme but like beans the result is almost always perfectly done rice without being mushy or underdone. Short grain brown rice takes approximately 30 minutes.
This probably isn’t even the case anymore but I grew up hearing about pressure cookers exploding and make horrific messes and maybe even hurting people. Pressure cookers are completely safe now. There’s usually several built in pressure release valves so that if one fails there’s other ways to release built up steam.
We have a T-Fal Sensor 2 which we’ve had for 10 years and it still looks and works like new.
It is significantly cheaper to grind your own specialty flours but you need a grain mill to do it. A bag of organic quinoa flour from Bob’s Red Mill is $6.19. You can buy a pound of organic quinoa at Trader Joe’s or even Whole Foods for $1.00. So at 25% of the cost of buying the flour you can grind your own – with the added bonus that the flour is completely and absolutely fresh. Just about any specialty flour: amaranth, coconut, almond, barley, brown rice, black bean, corn, spelt, millet, oat, and rye to name some can be quickly and cheaply made yourself.
A good grain mill isn’t cheap though so a purchase of this type probably makes more sense for someone who plans to use non-wheat specialty flours on an ongoing basis.
The grain mill can also be used for other things including, of course, grinding your own wheat.
Back when I ate soy – I ground up soy beans and made my own homemade tofu using the recipe from The Farm cookbook. The mill easily handled the soy and worked perfectly for tofu making.
We bought the Jupiter Family Grain Mill 8 years ago and are very happy with it. You get quite a bit of control over the coarseness / fineness of the flour grains and the machine is sturdy, simple to put together and take apart, and clean. I see that some website are selling it for around $200 and that sounds about right given inflation and what we paid for ours.
