Pressure King Pro - My latest attempt at eating better

So if you have been following my posts you know that I have tried many things to help me eat better and pretty much nothing has worked. Expanding my diet is possibly the most difficult thing I have ever tried to do. I have resigned myself to the fact that I have to first start by eating the things I can eat more often, instead of relying on junk to fill me up or living on breakfast cereal which being honest is something I would be quite happy to do.

The area that needs the most improvement is absolutely what I take to work, I tend to buy rubbish that can be microwaved quickly. Part of the reason for that is that I am absolutely rubbish at preparing things in advance. I struggle to find the time and motivation and on top of that I struggle with how limited I am in what I eat because lets face it, not everything can be cooked in advance, transported to work and then reheated in a microwave.

My latest attempt at improving things is the Pressure King Pro, which is an electric pressure cooker with varying pre-programmed settings. My mother bought one recently and absolutely loves it, and if she likes it it must be absolutely awesome because I swear to goodness, that woman likes nothing.

It sounded like just what I needed. It cooks things quickly, cooks a reasonably large amount (it has a five litre capacity), is easy to clean and doesn't really need any input from a human after its set up. All you do is chuck everything in and choose the appropriate setting. Sounds so easy, even I can do it so I went out and bought one yesterday.

Now I admit I actually used it for the first time last night, but I had the idea that it would make a good blog post after the fact so I hadn't taken any photos so this is actually the second time I have used it. Last night I made a chicken and rice dish that cooked in exactly 12 minutes (plus time for the machine to build pressure and my prep time) and was delicious.

Today's offering is my idea of a chicken stew (remember I am a picky eater).

Firstly I chopped the chicken and added it to the rather large pot. Since this blog is about my life as a picky eater, the picture below is the amount of chicken I cut off and binned because it didn't meet my ridiculous standards (see even I know how ridiculous it is) Some of it has weird white bits on it, some has cartilage and some veiney bits - all in the bin!

I then peeled, chopped and added the carrots and potatoes. Carrots are one of the four vegetables I can eat so I am trying to eat them as often as I can.

I added water and one of those stock pot things, closed the lid and selected the 'meat' programme. There is a stew programme but that turns the machine into a slow cooker rather than a pressure cooker and since the whole point of this meal prepping thing is that I am going to cook several meals today and do it quickly, using the slow cooker function seemed to defeat the point. I added a few extra minutes to the timer because 13 minutes didn't seem enough and noted to myself that I need to figure out how to adjust timings and get my head around these programmes somehow.

And this is the finished product - 

Ok so I had to add some gravy cubes because the one stock pot thingy was nowhere near enough but that was very easy to do, I just crumbled them in and put the machine back on without the lid for a few minutes so I could stir it in and that was that.

I have to say it tasted fantastic and including prep and heating time couldn't have taken much more than half an hour to prepare. Best part is because you don't need to do anything while it is cooking, you are free to use that time for something else, for example, writing this blog post.

I have since washed the machine and currently have a whole chicken cooking in there which means I will get a whole cooked chicken, and more than enough stock to make a pot of soup too.

Meal prepping is turning out to be really easy with my new Pressure King Pro; in fact I am doing so well that I think I will need to order more bags for my vacuum sealer to store it all in!