Quick and Easy Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook (New Shoe Press)

by Barbara Schieving

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Quick and Easy Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook is a new tutorial guide and cookbook for the electric pressure cooker with recipes developed and curated by Barbara Schieving. Due out 24th Jan 2023 from Quarto on their New Shoe Press imprint, it's 144 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats. 

The electric pressure cooker is a kitchen machine which has honestly revolutionized food prep in most kitchens in the last 20 years. They're versatile, relatively inexpensive (even the ones with advanced features), and can cut cooking time significantly. The author is an undisputed expert in the field and has several cookbooks utilizing non-brand-specific pressure cookers. This one purports to be quick and easy. 

The book has a sensible and accessible layout: the introduction gives an overview over the features available and how the cooker does what it does and how to best utilize the machine's capabilities. The following chapters contain the recipes arranged by category: breakfast, sandwich wraps & more, soup, shortcut dinners, 30 minute meals, Sunday suppers, and desserts. Recipes are written with an introduction, ingredients in bullet lists in a sidebar, and are followed by step by step cooking directions. Ingredient measurements are given in imperial (American) units with metric in parentheses. (Yay!!). Most ingredients will be available at any moderately well stocked grocery store in North America. 

Roughly 25-30% of the recipes are accompanied by photographs. The food is well styled and serving suggestions are attractive and appropriate. Nutritional information is not provided. For strictly "from scratch" cooks, the author does make use of a large number of convenience foods and pre-mixes such at corn muffin mix, bottled barbecue sauce, canned tomatoes, premade stock, and frozen vegetables. 

I have generally used my pressure cooker to saute + cook dishes in some combination. The author writes many (most?) recipes with one or more extra steps requiring stove top or other pre-prep steps. For readers cooking for specialized diets, these recipes will -definitely- require some major reworks to be AIP, FODMAP, vegetarian, or other diet-compliant. 

Four stars, with the above codicils. There are a number of simple and appealing recipes here which are delicious and don't take much time, such as tamale pie (much like the "miracle bisquick cheeseburger pie) and the 3 ingredient pulled pork. Both were easy and quick to make. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.